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New England 




THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 



THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 




A logging team in the White Mountains 



New England 

A Human Interest 
Geographical Reader 



By Clifton Johnson 



With Two Hundred 
Illustrations 



Published by The Macmillan Company 

New Tork MCMXVll 

London : Macmillan and Co., Limited 



Copyright, 1917, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1917. 



MAR 22 1917 



NorijjooO i^waa 

J. 8. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



0)CI.A455984 



Contents 



I Life and Nature Past and Present . . . i 

II New England's Longest River . . . .12 

III The Development of Travel 23 



MASSACHUSETTS 

IV Cape Cod 36 

V Plymouth and the Pilgrims 48 

VI Boston, Old and New 59 

VII The Fishermen . . 82 

VIII On the Massachusetts Coast 91 

IX Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard . . .105 

X The Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts . -115 

XI Beautiful Berkshire 130 

XII Bay State Industries, Places, and Famous People 143 



CONNECtlCUT 

XIII Connecticut Beginnings 161 

XIV Industry in Connecticut 173 

XV Along the Connecticut Shore . . . .183 

XVI Connecticut Places and Famous People . .196 



Vlll 



Contents 



RHODE ISLAND 

XVII The Story of Block Island 211 

XVIII Klng Philip and His Narragansett Allies . 220 

XIX A City of Pleasure 226 

XX The Smallest State 236 

NEW HAMPSHIRE 

XXI Early New Hampshire 247 

XXII The White Mountains 257 

XXIII New Hampshire Places and Famous People . 270 



VERMONT 

XXIV Early Vermont and the Green Mountain Boys 282 

XXV Lake Champlain 293 

XXVI Vermont Industries 303 

MAINE 

XXVII Historic Maine 316 

XXVIII The Maine Forests 329 

XXIX The Coast with a Hundred Harbors . . . 334 

XXX Maine Places, Industries, and Famous People . 354 



Introductory Note 

THE text of this book presents a general view of 
those characteristics which give New England 
interest and charm. The facts are drawn from geol- 
ogy, nature, and history, and from industry in many 
forms on land and sea. Biography, literature, legend, 
and humor have also each added their portion. That 
every chapter shall be entertaining as well as in- 
structive, and that, above all, the text shall have 
constant human interest, has been the chief purpose 
in selecting what has been included. 

One point concerning New England I would like 
to emphasize here. Other parts of the country can 
raise far larger crops of various kinds, such as corn, 
wheat, and oats, but New England is unrivalled 
as the place to raise men. Its famous sons and 
daughters have conferred on it a great attraction ; 
and in our travels, viewing the farms and factories, 
the forests and waterways, the mountains, the rural 
towns, and the big cities, we shall often pause to 
visit the homes or the birthplaces of some of the 
worthies of the past whose names the whole nation 
treasures. 







°| * 1 i "^ ^^^^ of • -iifi - 1 1 ^ jj, ^ ^ 



-A 




Among those who have furnished illustrative material for 
this book are the following, and the pictures obtained from them 
appear on the pages as here listed : 

The Boston and Maine Railroad — 5, 22, 26, 77, 88, 97, 98, 
127, 130, 135, 146, 147, 151, 249, 259, 262, 264, 266, 267, 270, 
271, 274, 276, 277, 280, 281, 282, 284, 287, 296, 297, 299, 307, 

311, 340, 341, 346, 347, 350. The Boston and Albany Railroad 

— 9, 121, 131, 139. The Bangor and Aroostook Railroad — 

330, 354- 

The Kalkhoff Company — 107, 113, 166, 188, 240, 247, 268, 
321, 334, 343, 349, 351, 359. Houghton Mifflin Company — 
64, 96, 125, 152, 278, 358. G. P. Putnam's Sons — 13 from 
Bacon's "Connecticut River," 153 from Abbott's "Old Paths 
and Legends of New England," 206 from Clark's "History of 
Connecticut." E. L. Cleveland Company of Houlton, Maine 

— 364- 

State Publicity Bureau of Vermont — 23, 286, 294, 308, 310, 

312, 313- 

Mr. Thomas A. Hine of New York — 109. Mr. J. B. Stand- 
ish of Hartford— 162. Mr. Albert H. Pitkin of Hartford — 
199. Dr. George P. Coopernail of Bedford, N. Y. — 209. 
Mr. F. N. Kneeland of Northampton, Mass. — 197, 260, 265, 

291, 315, 361. 

Nearly all the other engravings are from photographs by the 
author. 



New England 




A Massachusetts log house in 1890 
Life and Nature, Past and Present 

NEW ENGLAND is nearer Europe than any 
other section of our country. Its shores were 
those first visited by people from northern Europe, 
and, after colonization began, settlements multiplied 
rapidly. It was named by Captain John Smith, who 



New England 



came across the Atlantic with two ships in 1614 and 
explored the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod. 

The region is halfway between the equator and the 
north pole, and, though the winters are severe, the 
summers are warm enough for the growth of a great 
variety of grains, fruits, and vegetables. It is not so 
far north that its harbors are closed by ice in winter, 

nor so far south 
that the ch- 
mate lessens 
the energy of 
its people. Per- 
sons with weak 
constitutions 
find the climate 
too harsh, but 
it helps those 
who are natu- 
rally robust to 
develop a desirable vigor of body and mind. 

New England is more than four hundred miles long 
north and south, and often the southern lowlands are 
bare when the forested uplands on the Canadian border 
are buried deep in snow. The winter weather is 
very changeable. A southeast wind from the Gulf 
Stream is likely to bring a winter rain, but such a 
storm may be followed by a cold "northwester" 
with driving snow. Then, after the skies clear, the 
mercury may drop well below zero. 




A deserted home among the hills 



Life and Nature, Past and Present 3 

In the summer the prevailing winds are from the 
southwest, and the heat is frequently intense, except 
along the coast, where the sea breezes moderate it. 
Afternoon and evening thunderstorms are a feature 
of the warm months. These showers, though they 
often interrupt farm work and do more or less damage, 
supply needed moisture to the crops, and replenish 
the streams to the great benefit of the mills that de- 
pend on water power. 

The climate was once much colder than it is now. 
In the northerly part of the continent the snow did 




Apple blossom time 



not melt in the spring, but accumulated and formed 
an immense sheet of ice. The ice extended across 



4 New England 

Canada and covered the whole of New England. 
From the northern uplands it crept slowly southward 
in a vast glacier, and its front edge was where the cli- 
mate was warm enough to melt it away as fast as it 
pushed along. 

The melting ice kept depositing boulders and lesser 
stones of various sizes, and pebbles and gravel. Many 
hills in the southeastern part of New England were 
formed in that way, and some of the neighboring 
islands. 

We are indebted to that ancient glacier for most 
of our numerous lakes and ponds, for, as the ice passed 
over the rock, it ground away that which was soft 
faster than that which was hard, and so formed basins 
large and small. Most of these basins have since 
been filled with sediment, but many of them are now 
occupied by lakes. Other lakes were formed in val- 
leys that had been dammed by glacial drift. 

When the climate gradually became warmer the 
borders of the ice sheet receded, and the drift rubbish 
that it deposited is found over a large part of New 
England. The scattered boulders are often entirely 
unlike any local rock, and we have to go to the dis- 
tant north to discover their starting point. 

Nearly all of New England's early villages were 
distributed along the coast and the fertile valley of the 
Connecticut, where they could communicate with each 
other by water. Scarcely had the settlements begun 
to push up the other valleys when this expansion was 



Life and Nature, Past and Present 



checked by the bloody struggle of King Philip's War. 
Afterward attacks by the French and Indians from the 
north made it dangerous to extend the frontiers until 
Canada was conquered by the English in 1759. 

New England life changed slowly for two centuries. 
The famihes that gathered before the big fireplaces 
were large, and 

the children, "^ . I - \Y^r\,f I 
when they grew 
up and mar- 
ried, moved on 
and took up 
new land. 
They cleared 
the forest, piled 
the boulders 
that encum- 
bered the soil 
into stone 
walls, and pro- 
duced on their farms the necessaries of life, including 
grain and meat. 

Roads were poor and travel difficult, and each com- 
munity depended largely on itself. The farmer built 
his own house, and raised wool and flax, which the 
women spun and wove into cloth and made into wear- 
ing apparel. Indeed, most of the things which now 
would be bought in the stores the rustic household 
contrived to supply themselves or did without. 




A glacial boulder in New Hampshire 



6 New England 

The earlier settlers built their houses in village 
groups that they might better protect themselves from 




A kitchen fireplace which was in everyday use until njoo 

the savages and the wild animals of the wilderness. 
Later the tendency grew to dwell on scattered farm- 
steads. 

Population showed little tendency to concentrate 
in large towns. At the beginning of the nineteenth 
century Boston had only twenty-five thousand 
people, Providence had less than eight thousand, 
Hartford five thousand, Portland four thousand, and 
most other places that have since become populous 
cities were either country villages or did not exist 
at all. 

When the settlements had flowed over New England's 



Life and Nature, Past and Present 7 

uplands the people began to be attracted westward 
by the greater fertility of the lands in New York and 
beyond. Trade and commerce assumed increased 
importance, and more and more young men left the 
farms to seek their fortunes in the growing seaport 
towns. These towns waxed rich on the profits of their 
traffic. Their vessels went after fish, or made long 
voyages across the seas, carrying the surplus products 
of their own land and bringing back manufactured 
goods and tropical products. 

New England's numerous good harbors have always 
been a valuable commercial asset, and all its states 
have a considerable length of coast in proportion to 
their size, except New Hampshire, which has only 
eighteen miles, and Vermont, which lies wholly inland. 

None of the six states is large. Even Maine, which 
is nearly as big as all the other five put together, exceeds 
in size only four states outside of New England. Any 
one of nineteen states beyond the Mississippi is larger 
than the entire New England group. Texas is four 
times as large. It would take two hundred and fifty 
Rhode Islands to make Texas. 

But though New England is only about one fiftieth 
of the area of the United States, and though it has no 
important gold, silver, or iron mines, nor any exten- 
sive coal deposits, nor much rich farm land, it has a 
fifteenth of the nation's total population. It has a 
still larger proportion of the national wealth, and the 
people live better than those in almost any other part 



8 New England 

of the world. This prosperity is largely due to manu- 
facturing. 

In colonial days New England had very few mills 
except those where logs were sawed and grain was 
ground, but afterward other mills increased rapidly in 
number and size and drew more and more people to 
them. At first the workers came from New England's 
own farm uplands, but later great numbers flocked in 
from foreign countries. The numerous rivers that 
make a rapid descent from the hills and mountains 
furnish an abundance of cheap power. When there is 
a good fall, even a small river is capable of doing the 
work of hundreds of horses. 

Dams were built, and the water led around the falls 
in canals to turn the wheels of the mills that were 
erected beside these artificial waterways. At the 
more important falls great manufacturing towns have 
grown up. Their mills do not depend altogether on 
water power now. Steam made by burning coal is 
also largely used. Nearly all the coal has to be brought 
from distant mines, yet New England mills and workers 
are so highly developed that the region continues to be 
a great centre for manufacturing all those wares in 
which the chief essentials of production are skilled 
labor and mechanical genius. 

As a farming region New England is a good deal 
handicapped. Much of it is mountainous or stony, 
and the only very fertile portions are in the river valleys 
and along the coast. A large part of Maine is wilder- 



Life and Nature, Past and Present 9 

ness and swamps. The farms fall far short of producing 
enough to feed the people, and the great food staples, 
such as wheat, corn, and oats, are largely brought from 
the West. 

None of the states raises wheat except Maine and 
Vermont, and in those the amount is small. Corn and 
oats are both important New England crops, and Con- 
necticut and Massachusetts have good-sized tobacco- 
growing sections. Apples and other fruits are largely 
cultivated, and market gardening is done on a generous 




Water power on a typical New England stream 



scale near the cities. Dairying is a great industry. 
So much milk is needed in the big cities that it is 
sometimes carried on trains that convey nothing else 



lo New England 

but milk cans from far out in the country. A great 
deal of milk is used also in making butter and cheese. 

There has long been a decreasing population in the 
upland towns. This dates back to the building of 
railroads and to the great development of manufactur- 
ing that began somewhat earlier. Traffic and trade 
and invention increased the social attraction of the 
large towns as compared with that of the country 
hamlets and lonely farms. Besides, mowing machines 
and other agricultural machines began to be used. 
These were ill-adapted for work on the rocky, uneven 
upland, and remoteness from railways or markets 
there made it difficult to dispose of crops. Farm life 
under such circumstances returned so little in pleasure 
or profit that it could not keep the young people from 
drifting away to the towns, and deserted houses going 
to ruin, and neglected farmlands growing up to woods 
have been common everywhere among the New 
England hills. Often the only trace of the old homes 
is some ruinous stone wall, a half -filled cellar hole and 
chimney heap, or a brush-grown family graveyard. 

But on the whole farm conditions are improving. 
Methods of work are better, and the farmers are 
learning the needs of their soil, the scientific use of 
fertiHzers, how to combat the pests that threaten their 
crops, and how to market their produce effectively. 
Most important of all, the social pleasures within reach 
of the rustic dwellers have become more varied. 

The rural villages continue to be trading points for 



Life and Nature, Past and Present i i 

the surrounding farms, and the country stores take 
eggs and butter in exchange for groceries, dry goods, 
tools, and other wares. Usually each farmer has a 




A rustic village 

garden and small orchard, and he produces hay and 
corn. He keeps at least one or two horses, a few cows, 
and a flock of hens. Some men have half a dozen 
kinds of domestic animals, and cultivate their land in 
small plots devoted to different sorts of crops. But 
the progressive farmers give their attention to a single 
product or class of products. 




Shad fishermen near the mouth of the Connecticut 
New England's Longest River 

THE name of the Connecticut River is a com- 
bination of Indian words which mean "the river 
with the long tide." This descriptive phrase refers to 
the tidal rise and fall of the water as far as the Enfield 
Rapids above Hartford. The river's source is in the 



New England's Longest River 



3 



primeval forest at the extreme northern point of New 
Hampshire near the top of the mountain ridge that 
forms the Canadian line. Here is a little lake of 
only a few acres which is more than twenty-five 
hundred feet above the sea level. This is known as 
Fourth Lake. Within about a dozen miles below 
are Third, Second, and First lakes, the last of which is 
also called Connecticut Lake ; and all four are linked 
together by the infant river. The stream flows south- 
ward between Vermont and New Hamphshire and 
across Massachusetts and Connecticut till it reaches 




A logman's houseboat on the upper river 

Long Island Sound. Its entire length is four hundred 
and ten miles. It is the longest river in New England, 
and its valley is one of the fairest in America. 



14 New England 

"In the ancient valley of the river from northern 
Massachusetts to New Haven, where the stream for- 
merly joined the Sound, marvellous fossil footprints 
have been found in the old layered rocks. The New 
England climate was much warmer in that remote 
period when these footprints were made in the water- 
side mud of what was then an inlet from the sea, and 
it seemed to favor the development of gigantic forms 
of life. Huge birds strode about that were four 
times as large as an ostrich, and some of them weighed 
nearly half a ton. There were strange frog-like 
creatures with feet twenty inches long, and many other 
curious animals large and small that have vanished 
from the earth. No bones of these ancient swamp and 
jungle dwellers have been found, and but for the foot- 
prints turned to stone we would not know that such 
creatures had lived in the Connecticut Valley of that 
far-off time. 

Where the river's bordering lowlands are sufficiently 
broad and unobstructed by hills and rocks it forms 
long loops, and the channel is always gradually shift- 
ing. Sometimes the stream shortens its course by cut- 
ting across the neck of one of these "oxbows." Such 
a cut was made in 1840 just below Northampton. A 
farmer had ploughed a strip the previous fall from 
bank to bank on the neck, and in February a jam of 
ice in the bow set the water back so that it ran across 
the ploughed field. In a few hours it had torn a new 
channel. This caused great rejoicing in the towns 



New England's Longest River 15 

above, and at Northampton the bells were rung. The 
towns were three miles nearer tidewater, and, as the 




A river oxbow viewed from Mount Holyoke in 1840 

valley had as yet no railroad, the river was an impor- 
tant highway for commerce. 

In the winter, ice bridges the river almost completely 
from source to mouth, but by the beginning of April 
the ice has usually been much weakened by the sun's 
increasing warmth. At the same time the snow on the 
northern mountains melts, and every little stream 
becomes a torrent and rushes down to the river to 
swell its current. Hea\^ rains often add to the volume 
of water, and the ice crumbles and is swept down the 
stream. The channel is likely to fill to the brim, the 
low ground that borders it is flooded, and the brown 



i6 



New England 



meadows that lie higher have long lagoons in their 
hollows. 

Sometimes the water rises so high that it invades 
villages and scattered dwellings, and it may carry off 
buildings, fences, and bridges. The greatest flood on 
record was that of 1862. It was caused entirely by 
melting snow in a spell of remarkably warm weather. 
Some of the riverside dwellers had lively times com- 
pelling their horses and cows to wade and swim to 
ground that was not submerged. The hens were 
taken to lofts, and the hay and grain and tools were 
cared for as well as possible. 

While the men were working outdoors the women and 
children were cleaning the house cellars and first floors. 




High water on the outskirts of Northampton 



Canned fruits, and the pickled pork, and the potatoes 
and other vegetables were carried to the second story, 



New England's Longest River 17 

carpets had to be taken up, and furniture moved. 
Some of the houses were situated so low that the families 
in them were carried in boats to houses more favorably 
situated. 

One of the most notable floods occurred in autumn. 
It was in October, 1869. For thirty-six hours the 
rain fell in sheets and streamed down the window-panes 
so that a person could hardly see out. Husking had 
begun, but much of the corn was still in the fields, and 
great quantities were swept away. The river was full 
of stalks and pumpkins and wreckage of all sorts. An 
organ factory and other buildings were overwhelmed, 
and after the waters receded many black-walnut 
boards from the organ works, boxes of boots and shoes, 
barrels of flour, and much else were found stranded 
along the banks. But nearly everything had been 
greatly damaged, if not ruined, by the muddy water. 

The Indians were the river's earliest navigators. 
They paddled its winding length in their bark canoes 
and dugouts on fishing and hunting expeditions, or on 
forays against their enemies. Its first white explorer 
was Adrian Block, who visited it in 1614 in a small 
Dutch yacht, the Onrust, a name that means Restless in 
English. He went up the river until the Enfield 
Rapids prevented his going farther. Ten years later 
the Dutch had begun to make somewhat frequent 
trading voyages to the river. 

All through the colonial period the Connecticut was 
an important highway for trade and war. At first no 



1 8 New England 

large craft went beyond the head of tide-water sixty 
miles from the mouth. But soon a scow was contrived 
that with twelve men to pole it could pass up the Enfield 
Rapids, and then it could go on as far as the South 
Hadley Falls. These and certain of the other falls 
beyond were an effective barrier to navigation up- 
stream, though rafts and boats could come down some 




A fall near Greenfield, Mass. 

of them when conditions were favorable. Men became 
very expert in running the rapids in their flatboats. 

As settlements pushed farther and farther up the 
river and the region grew more populous, roads were 
made around the unnavigable falls, so that goods 
brought by the flatboats could be transported on the 
oxcarts of the local farmers to the opposite end, and 
the voyage be continued on other boats. 



New England's Longest River 1 9 

The flatboats were generally provided with a large 
square mainsail and a topsail. When the wind was un- 
favorable the boats were propelled by poling. The 
poles were from twelve to twenty feet long and had a 
socket spike at the lower end. One spike-pole man 
on each side was sufficient for the smaller boats, but 
as many as three on a side were needed on the larger 
boats. The spiked end of the pole was thrust down to 
the river bottom, and the pole-man brought its upper 
end against his shoulder and walked along, shoving 
as he advanced. The captain stood at the stern and 
steered with a rudder on the larger boats, and a wide- 
bladed oar on the smaller ones. Cargoes of merchan- 
dise and the household goods of new settlers were 
brought up the river, and shingles, potash, and other 
products carried down. Passengers, too, were occa- 
sionally transported. 

A canal around the South Hadley Falls was completed 
in 1795. This was the first canal in America for the 
improvement of river navigation. Its length was two 
and one half miles, much of the way through solid slate 
rock. Canals were made later around several of the 
other falls, and the river was a very busy thoroughfare. 
The landings along the shores became the favorite 
resorts for leisurely dwellers in their vicinity to see 
the boats come in. 

Some of the later flatboats were seventy feet in length 
and fifteen feet across at the widest part. At the stern 
was a snug cabin, and the captain and crew lived on 



20 New England 

board. The crews of the small boats boarded at water- 
side taverns and farmhouses. The boats usually 




The outlet of the canal around Enfield Rapids 

tied up to the bank at night, but might go on when 
the moon shone and the wind favored. Traffic on the 
river kept increasing until a railroad was built up the 
valley. 

There were no bridges across the river until after the 
Revolution, and ferries were an important institution. 
Many of the early ferries had no larger craft than a 
canoe. If a mounted man wanted to cross, he sat at 
the back end of the canoe holding a leading rein, and 
let the horse swim along behind. A cart would either 
be towed over, or, if a stout skiff could be had, the cart 



New England's Longest River 21 

was taken to pieces so it could be loaded on the boat. 
At some ferries a raft was used. Later, flatboats be- 
came common, and such still go back and forth at the 
present day ferries. They are kept from floating down 






A ferryboat. The ferryman is on the shore prying around the 
end of the boat to make a better landing for the load of hay 

stream by a wire that slips through pulleys on the boat. 
The wire has its ends securely fastened on the banks, 
and it lies on the river bottom except as the passing 
boat brings it up. 

Fish formerly abounded in the river and were a 
valuable source of food supply. Shad went up the 
stream as far as Bellows Falls, and the salmon were such 
powerful swimmers that they ascended these falls and 
continued their journey still farther north. No salmon 



22 



New England 



come to the river now, and the shad only make their 
way up about fifty miles. 

Men used to go out with boats into the rocky 
rapids at South Hadley, anchor, and catch shad 
with scoop-nets. When a boat was full it would 
be brought to land and the shad taken out. Then 
it would return for more. Two men would in this 
way sometimes secure three thousand shad in a single 
day. 

Shad are no longer plentiful anywhere in the river, 
but quite a number of fishermen still seek them down 
toward the river's mouth. 




Bellows Falls, which the shad weix' not able to get up 




An oxcart load of hay on a Vermont highway 
The Development of Travel 

WHEN the first Europeans came across the sea 
there were no roads here. The Indians did not 
have wagons, horses, or cattle, and narrow footpaths, 
scarcely better than those made by the wild forest 
creatures, served all their needs. The only way that the 



24 New England 

pioneers had of getting from place to place on the land 
was by these Indian trails. The moccasined feet of the 
savages hardly left a trace of their passage, but the 
heavy boots of the white men soon cut the soil into 
well-defined pathways. When new paths were made 
through the forests the settlers "blazed" the trees; 
that is, they slashed a piece of bark off from frequent 
tree trunks along the way, and the blazes stood out 
distinctly in the shadowy woodland and kept travellers 
from going astray. 

There were no bridges. The colonists crossed the 
lesser rivers and brooks by wading, or perchance on a 
fallen tree. If accompanied by an Indian guide, the 
guide might do the wading and carry the white man 
"pick-a-back." 

The earlier travellers journeyed with packs on their 
shoulders, but presently the trails were widened, and 
horses bore the burdens. Later the trails were 
broadened still more to enable carts to move along 
them. 

The roads w^re gradually improved. Swamps and 
soft places were crossed by means of corduroy, which 
consisted of tree trunks cut in lengths to reach across 
the road and laid side by side in the mud. They were 
lightly covered with earth, but this soon washed off, 
and made a wagon's progress over the roadbed a con- 
tinuous series of bumps. 

Gravel roads were gradually introduced, and after a 
time plank roads. The latter afforded smooth and 



The Development of Travel 25 

comfortable riding when new. A famous trotting horse 
about 1850 made the wonderful time of "Two forty on 
a plank road," and this phrase became a common ex- 
pression to indicate the acme of speed. 

In recent years the state governments have done 
much in building improved roads. The road-bed is 
first laid out on gentle grades, and then crushed stone, 
coarse below and fine above, is put on and rolled hard. 
If such a road is properly cared for, and the spots that 
wear into hollows promptly mended, it is always in 
good condition both for rapid travel and for hea\^^ 
loads. Unfortunately, the needful care is sometimes 
lacking, and the wear and tear occasioned by automo- 
biles makes the upkeep of these roads very expensive. 
The first cost is also large. 

It therefore seems doubtful if this t\'pe of road 
can become universal. A decidedly less costly road, 
and one that has some real advantages over the stone 
road in country districts, is the clay-gravel road. Clay 
and gravel mixed in the right proportions form a very 
firm road-bed that, if kept properly rounded, does not 
become muddy in the winter and spring thaws, nor 
does the summer trafhc grind it into dust. 

The most efficient machine for keeping a dirt road 
in good condition is a simple inexpensive contrivance 
known as the split log drag. If this is drawn over the 
highway just after a rain, it rounds the road up, smooths 
off ridges, fills depressions, and packs the earth down 
hard. A road thus treated is comparatively free from 



26 



New England 



mud and dust, and 
there is real com- 
fort in travelling 
on it. 

Most country- 
roads still receive 
only the rudest 
and most unscien- 
tific care. They 
are mended by 
scraping in waste 
from the gutters, 
with the result 
that the road is a 
morass of mud in 
spring and deep in 
dust in summer. 

In January, 
1673, the first mail 
on the American 
continent was de- 
spatched from 
New York to Bos- 
ton by way of New 
Haven, Hartford, 
Springfield, and 
Worcester. The 
post-rider arrived in Boston a fortnight later, and 
after resting for a day or two he set off on his return 




A New Hampshire roadway. The name 

of the height in the background is 

Eagle CUft" 



The Development of Travel 27 

journey. He was expected to make the round trip 
once a month. The letters, papers, and small parcels 
which made up the mail were not so numerous but 
that he could carry them in his saddle-bags. 

In 1704 a lady, who afterward became a Boston 
school-teacher, went over the route with the post-rider 
by way of Providence and New London. They 
mounted their horses and left Boston on Monday, 
October 2. Tuesday afternoon they came to a ford 
which she did not dare to ride through. So the post- 
man got a boy to take her across in a canoe, and he 
himself rode through the water and led her horse. 
Sometimes the highway was so narrow that the trees 
and bushes on either side gave them "very unpleasant 
embraces with their branches." 

At one of the taverns where they stopped for the 
night, her apartment was only separated from the 
kitchen by a thin board partition, and for a long time 
she could get no sleep "because of the clamor of some 
town topers in the next room." 

At the end of the colonial period men and women still 
made nearly all their journeys on horseback. The 
ladies often rode on pillions behind the men. Horse- 
blocks to aid them in mounting were common. Four- 
wheeled passenger carriages did not come into general 
use until the beginning of the next century. Even 
the two-wheeled chaises had not been known long, and 
were kept by their owners like their Sunday clothes, 
to be used only on special occasions. 



28 



New England 



After the Revolution mail was despatched from each 
end of the Boston and New York route to the other 
end thrice a week in summer and twice a week in 
winter. When the travelling was good the post- 
rider made the 
journey in six 
days. 

The mail for 
the smaller 
places was left 
in some tavern 
or store where 
everyone could 
look it over. 
It consisted 
chiefly of news- 
papers. Let- 
ters were few. 
Villages off the 
main route 
were not likely 
to receive mail oftener than once a week. On post day, 
as it was called, half the inhabitants would assemble 
when the mail arrived at the village tavern. If the 
postrrider's visit was at midday, some one took him 
home to dinner, and while he ate he related, amid the 
silence of his auditors, the latest news and gossip 
gathered along the way. 

Stage-coaches began to run between New York and 




A four-horse stage-coach 



The Development of Travel 29 

Boston in the summer of 1772. A coach starting from 
one of the places on Monday morning would arrive 
at the other on Saturday evening. The fare was 
threepence a mile. A single stage soon proved to be 
inadequate, and by 1802 a coach departed over the route 
daily from each end. 

News could travel no faster than the stage-coaches, 
and when Washington died in 1799 at Mount Vernon 
on December 14, the news of his death did not reach 
Boston until ten days later. It took a month to get 
in all the returns of a state election in Massachusetts in 
those times. 

The early stage-coach was a wagon, the body of which 
was a large oblong box with high sides. This box was 
on springs, and up above was a canvas or leather- 
covered top with side curtains which let down in cold or 
stormy weather. There were usually four seats, and 
these accommodated eleven persons besides the driver. 
The seats had no backs, and the rear one was preferred 
because there one could lean against the end of the 
wagon box. It was customary to let the women pas- 
sengers occupy that seat. 

Only fourteen pounds of baggage could be carried 
by each person free. It was placed under the seats. 
In the warmer months about forty miles a day were 
covered, but in winter rarely more than twenty-five. 

Josiah Quincy, president of Harvard College, who 
went from Boston to New York by stage just after 
the close of the Revolution, says: "The carriages 



30 New England 

were old and shackling and much of the harness of 
ropes. We reached our resting-place for the night, if 
no accident intervened, at ten o'clock, and, after a 
frugal supper, went to bed with a notice that we should 
be called at three." 

Whether it snowed or rained, the traveller must 
make ready to start by the help of a candle or rude 
lantern. Sometimes the coachman would call out to 
the passengers to lean to one side or the other, so as to 
prevent the coach from toppling over when the wheels 
went into a rut. There were occasions when they had 
to alight and help lift the coach from a quagmire. 
Once, when the passengers of a coach rebelled at this 
requirement, the driver sat down by the roadside and 
calmly lit his pipe. They made anxious inquiries as 
to the meaning of his inaction, and he said, "Since 
those horses can't pull that carriage out of that mudhole 
and you won't help, I'm going to wait till the mudhole 
dries up." 

The passengers concluded to alight and assist. 

In the early years of the nineteenth century the stage- 
coaches were built with oval bodies suspended on stout 
bands of leather. There were three seats inside, each 
intended for three persons. The middle seat was a 
movable bench with a broad strip of leather to support 
the passengers' backs. The driver sat outside in 
front, and most of the baggage was carried on a rack 
behind. These coaches travelled six miles an hour on 
good roads. 



The Development of Travel 31 

In 1827 a Concord, New Hampshire, carriage-maker 
invented the Concord coach, which has never been 
excelled. It has a strong heavy body, and passengers 
can ride both inside and on its stout top. This is the 
kind of coach that transported the mails and treasure 
across the western plains and mountains, and it is 
still used in all parts of the world where there are no 
railroads. 

Toward the end of the stage-coach period one hun- 
dred and eight lines ran out of Boston, and forty-two 
from Hartford. 

In the less thickly settled parts of the country a 
stage wagon was used. This was a primitive uncovered 
vehicle usually drawn by two horses. Chairs some- 
times served as seats, and there were not always enough 
to go round. A traveller writing in 1807 of a summer 
journey in Vermont from Burlington to St. Albans 
says : "I had a seat on the mail bag and other goods. 
The road in many parts was continually obstructed 
by large stones, stumps of trees, and fallen timber, deep 
ruts, and holes. I shall never forget the shaking, jolt- 
ing, jumbling, and tossing over the road. We had 
only two poor jaded horses to drag us, which obliged 
me to alight and fag through the sand and dust, exposed 
to a burning sun." 

America's earliest railroad was built in Quincy, 
Massachusetts, from the great granite quarries there 
to tide-water in the Neponset River, a distance of less 
than three miles. The cars were run by horse-power, 



32 New England 

and the first trip was made in October, 1826. Wooden 
rails were used. They were laid on blocks of stone, and 
covered with strips of iron. A single horse could draw 
twenty tons of granite on one of the wagon-like cars. 

The first locomotive trip in New England was made 
from Boston to Davis's tavern in Newton in March, 
1834. By the end of the next year railroads from 
Boston to Lowell, Boston to Worcester, and Boston to 
Providence were in operation. The railroad reached 
Springfield from Worcester in 1839, ^^^ two years 
later had been built over the mountains to Albany. 

On these early railroads the speed was about fifteen 
miles an hour, and the fare was three or four cents a 
mile. The first cars were Concord stage-coaches with 
the wheels altered to fit and stay on the rails, but 
soon long cars were substituted. They were coupled 
together like freight cars with no platforms nor entrances 
at the ends. The outside was commonly painted 
yellow. There was a running board and three doors 
on each side. The seats were arranged as now, except 
that they were in twos back to back and not reversible. 
They were covered with drab cloth and had loosely- 
hung bands of haircloth for backs. Each car accommo- 
dated twenty-four persons. The train was in charge of 
a "trainmaster," who carried a whip to keep boys 
from stealing a ride. Neither he nor the brakeman 
wore uniforms. The brakes were levers worked by 
hand. 

People from all around came to see the trains when 



The Development of Travel 33 

they first began running. Here is a paragraph from a 
local paper that gives some idea of the excitement this 
new method of travel caused. It refers to the passing 
through Stamford, Connecticut, of the first New York 
and New Haven train on an autumn afternoon in 1849 • 

"The citizens of this village were nearly frightened 
out of their propriety by such a horrible scream as was 
never heard to issue from any other than a metallic 
throat. Animals of every description went careering 
around the fields, sniffing at the air in their terror; 
and bipeds of every size, condition, and color set off at 
a full run for the railroad depot. In a few moments 
the cause of the commotion appeared in the shape of a 
locomotive, puffing its steam and screaming with its 
so-called whistle at a terrible rate." 

The first engine on the Boston and Albany road was 
the "Meteor," imported from England. This was 
soon followed by the Massachusetts-built engines, 
"Yankee," "Comet," and "Rocket." Some of the 
earlier cars and engines had only four wheels. 

None of the engines had headlights. The freight 
engines were called " crabs." They had upright boilers, 
and on the front was the engineer's cab with curtains 
around the sides. The fireman was back of the boiler, 
and he had no shelter. 

At first the cars were without springs, and their 
jarring motion was far from comfortable. Accidents 
were many, and often, when the locomotive broke 
down, the train had to be dragged by horses or oxen 



34 New England 

to the nearest station and repair shop. Soon after 
Springfield had a railroad to the east and west, a freight 
train ran away and went right through the town 
roundhouse. Three men were killed. Behind the 
roundhouse were some big piles of cord wood, and 
that wood was scattered all about mingled with broken 
cars and freight and the wreckage of the building. A 
great many people flocked to the scene, and they wagged 
their heads and agreed that these railroads smashing 
around that way were a very doubtful blessing. 

The road-bed of the early railways was made of what- 
ever material came handiest, and it was streaked with 
all kinds of soils that had been dug through or dumped 
on. When the ground froze, the soils that held water 
would bulge and tilt the tracks about in all sorts of 
shapes. Later gravel was used because water would 
drain through it, and it was not affected by frost, nor 
was it very dusty. The finest road-beds now are made 
of broken stone. 

The tracks were at first made of flat iron strips three 
fourths of an inch thick, spiked on wooden stringers. 
The spikes soon rattled loose, and on each engine was a 
man with a sledge hammer watching the track and 
ready to drive down any spike he saw sticking up. An- 
other source of trouble lay in the tendency of the ends 
of the strap iron to curve up into what were called 
"snake heads." These sometimes pierced the bottoms 
of the cars and did great damage. 

When the T rail was adopted the railroad managers 



The Development of Travel 



35 



thought their troubles were at an end, and that httle 
further care of the road-bed would be necessary. Grass 
was allowed to grow between the tracks, but the wheels 
crushed it on the rails and made them slippery, and the 
roots held water and rotted the ties. So steps had 
to be taken to keep the grass away from the neighbor- 
hood of both ties and rails. 

Southern New England now has more railroads than 
any other section of the Union of similar size. 

In 1835 ^ resident of Brandon, Vermont, built an 
electric motor, and with it operated a small model rail- 
way. Other experiments of the same sort were made 
later in Europe, but not until many years had passed 
was an electric railroad built for use. The first one in 
the United States was constructed in 1883. Since then 
the development of electric car lines has been very 



1 



# t 




A horse-car still used on Block Island in 191 6 
rapid, and latterly many powerful electric engines have 
been made to take the place of steam engines on some 
of the great railroad systems. 




A Puritan maiden 

Cape Cod 

CAPE COD thrusts out into the sea like a man's 
bended arm with the fist clenched. It extends 
eastward thirty-five miles, then northerly thirty more, 
and has an average width of about six miles. In the 
interior the land rises to a height of two or three hun- 
36 



Cape Cod 37 

dred feet. The Cape is composed almost entirely of 
sand, not only on the surface, but to a great depth. A 
thin layer of soil overlays the sand, but there are many 
holes and ruts in this weather-beaten garment, and 
at the extremity of the Cape the sand is entirely bare. 

Bartholomew Gosnold, who landed on the Cape in 
1602, gave it its present name because of the great 
number of codfish he found in the adjacent waters. 
Various other names were bestowed on it, but none 
held except Gosnold's ; and this, as the famous old 
Boston parson, Cotton Mather, has said, "it will 
never lose till shoals of codfish be seen swimming on 
its highest hills." 

Trees do not flourish on the Cape, and such wood- 
lands as exist are apt to be fire-ravaged, and so thin 
that you can see the horizon through them. Oak 
trees twenty-five years old are often a mere scraggy 
shrubbery nine or ten feet high, and a person can reach 
to the topmost leaf of many of them. Much that is 
called woods is about half as high as this, and consists 
of patches of scrub oak, bayberry, beach plum, and 
wild roses, overrun with woodbine. When the roses 
are in bloom, the profusion of blossoms,, which mingle 
their perfume with the aroma of the bayberry, makes 
these patches very delightful. They are like oases in 
a desert. 

The soil is not so infertile as it appears, and there are 
some real advantages in its hghtness and freedom from 
stones. A book printed in 1802, speaking of this land 



38 New England 

for raising corn, says, "A plough passes through it 
speedily, and after the corn has come up, a small 
Cape horse, somewhat larger than a goat, will, with the 
assistance of two boys, easily hoe three or four acres 
in a day." 

Many of the old farmers, however, understood plough- 
ing the sea better than ploughing the land, and they 
did not disturb their sands much. Some of the land 
was not considered worth writing a deed for. 

One Cape crop which is known far and wide is cran- 
berries. Thousands of families in all parts of the coun- 
try have Cape Cod cranberries served with their roast 
turkey every Thanksgiving Day. 

The land devoted to raising these tart bright- 
colored berries was originally "fit for nothing but to 
hold the world together." Much of it, with the crop 
growing on it, is worth a thousand dollars an acre. 
The cranberry vines require a great deal of water, 
and the unsightly and apparently worthless bogs are 
best adapted for their culture. A marsh is selected 
where running water can be obtained, and after it has 
been cleared of bushes, stumps, and roots, the ground 
is made as level as a floor. The rich bog soil is then 
covered with sand several inches deep to prevent the 
easy growth of weeds. Here and there ditches are 
dug across it, and it is encircled with a ridge of earth. 

During the winter the marsh is kept flooded to guard 
the plants from the frost and kill insect eggs. Often 
it is necessary to raise the water in the ditches while 



Cape Cod 39 

the berries are ripening so that the roots embedded in 
rich peaty soil will be kept moist at the same time that 
the sand above is dry. 

The plants, when full-grown, cover the soil with a 
thick mat of vines, which in the early autumn are 
twinkled all over with ripe berries. Picking begins in 
mid-September, and lasts until the end of the month 
following. School keeps much of the summer in the 
cranberry districts, and there is a long autumn 
vacation to enable the children to help in the berry 
bogs. 

During the picking season all the energies of the 
people are directed to harvesting the berries. Dwell- 
ings are closed from morning till night. Cooking is 
done in the evening or on rainy days, and in fair weather 
every one is on the marshes all the hours of daylight. 
The pickers wear their oldest clothes, and the women 
draw stocking-legs over their arms as a defence against 
briers. 

If the weather threatens to be frosty, while the 
berries are still unpicked, brush fires are made at night 
along the edge of the bog. The fires are not expected 
to warm the air much, but they make a smoke, which 
settles over the level hollow of the marsh and serves 
as a protecting blanket. 

Houses on the Cape are usually low and small, and 
many of them have shingled sides. The older ones 
often have a surprising number of various-sized windows 
in their gables. There are apparently windows for 



40 New England 

the grown folks and windows for the children — three 
or four apiece ; just as a certain man had a large hole 
cut in his barn door for the cat to pass through and a 
smaller one for the kittens. 

Every town had its windmill before the days of 
railroads. The mill was a gray octagonal tower with a 
long timber in the rear slanting down to the ground 
where it entered the hub of a cartwheel. This timber 
served in some measure as a prop against the onset of 
the winds, but its main purpose was to enable a man, 
by rolling the cartwheel along, to turn the fans of the 
mill to face the breeze. A great circular rut was worn 
around the building by the wheel. These mills were 
set on high ground and served as landmarks, for there 
were no tall trees nor other objects that could be 
seen so distinctly on a far-off horizon, unless it was the 
meeting-houses, which also were commonly on an 
elevation. 

The Cape lies very open to the winds, and the buffet- 
ing of the fierce sea gales is evident in the upheave of 
the sand dunes and the landward tilt of the exposed 
trees. These trees have a very human look of fear, 
and seem to be trying to flee from the persecuting 
storms, but to be retarded by laggard feet. 

The outer side of the Cape presents a desolate 
succession of scrubby hills and hollows with rarely any 
cultivated land in sight, and the villages are for the 
most part on the low-lying and more protected inner 
side. On this side the water is often as smooth and 



Cape Cod 



41 



quiet as a pond, but the sea is never at rest on the 
other shore. 

There is an almost straight beach twenty-five miles 
long fronting the Atlantic, extending north from the 




On Cape Cod's inner shore. The boat is a tisliermans dory 

elbow of the Cape. Thoreau, the famous nature 
writer, once started at the southern end of this beach 
and walked the entire distance. He tells how every 
wave sent the foam running up the hard wet sand, 
sometimes making him beat a hasty retreat when a 
billow was unusually forceful. The sea was dark and 
stormy, and the breakers rushing to the shore looked 
like droves of a thousand wild horses with their white 
manes streaming far behind, and the long kelp weed 
that was tossed up from time to time suggested the 
tails of sea-cows sporting in the brine. 



42 New England 

The early settlers waged war against blackbirds 
and crows to protect their corn, and against wolves 
and foxes that were prone to prey on the domestic 
animals, and they dug clams, fished with line and net, 
and watched from their lookouts for off-shore whales. 

In many respects 
conditions are still 
the same. The sea 
is very near on 
both sides, and the 
people continue to 
be largely depend- 
ent on it for a 
living. It even 
furnishes a good 
many of them with 
all the wood they 
burn, for every 
landward gale 
strews the beach 
with wreckage and 
drift rubbish, some 
of which has value 




Digging clams at low tide 



for building purposes. Clams can be dug easily along 
shore, and, if a man chooses to go out in a boat, he can 
rake up quahaugs, a kind of deep-water clam, or he 
can catch fish. 

One of the most exciting events to the dwellers of a 
waterside village is the arrival of a school of black- 



Cape Cod 43 

fish, a species of whale which attains a length of fifteen 
or twenty feet and a weight of a ton. When these 
fish are sighted leaping along at the surface of the sea, 
the men and boys run to the beach, jump into their 
boats, and row out to get on the seaward side of them. 
If they succeed in doing that, they turn toward the 
shore and strike on the sides of their boats and blow 
horns to drive the fish in to the beach. As soon as the 
fish are stranded their pursuers leap out and lance them, 
and tie ropes to their tails to keep the tide from carry- 
ing them away. After the receding water has left the 
bodies on the land the blubber is cut off. Kettles 
are brought to the shore, fires are made under them, 
and the blubber is boiled for the oil. In one of 
these blackfish drives over fourteen hundred were 
captured. 

The nearness of the sea has played its part in enticing 
a large proportion of the Cape Cod men to a life of 
voyaging ; and, when the voyagers return and tell their 
adventures to the young people at home, an eager 
desire is aroused in their hearers to seek fortunes on 
the water. Not all who embark come back. At 
Truro, near the end of the Cape, is a monument in 
the graveyard that bears this inscription : 

Sacred to the memory of 57 citizens of Truro 
who were lost in seven vessels which foun- 
dered at sea in the memorable gale of oct. 3, 

1841. 



44 New England 

Their homes were all within a circuit of two miles. 
They were lost in fishing vessels, but the surviving 
inhabitants went a-fishing the next year as usual. 

On the bleak Atlantic shore of the town stands 
one of the most important of the Cape lighthouses. 
The Cape, with its shoals and fogs, is a region of 
great peril to vessels, especially for sailing boats and 
barges in winter and, in spite of the gleaming warning 
of Highland Light, many a good vessel goes ashore on 
the coast. The place used to be called Dangerfield. 
This was a very appropriate name. 

Where the Cape joins the mainland Buzzards Bay 
makes a deep indentation from the south, and as early 
as 1627 the advantages of a canal here were recognized. 
Various surveys were made as time went on, and ex- 
cavating was started twice by companies that after- 
ward abandoned the enterprise. The company which 
finally made the canal began digging in 1909. 

During the five years that it was being completed, 
there was an annual average of thirty-five ship dis- 
asters and twelve lives lost on the Cape coast. The 
canal shortens the voyage from Boston to New York 
about seventy miles and enables vessels to avoid a 
considerable stretch of exposed and stormy water. It 
traverses low salt marshes in part, and the land at its 
highest point is only twenty-nine feet above the sea- 
level. The length is eight miles, the depth twenty- 
five feet, the width at the bottom one hundred feet. 
It is lighted from end to end with electricity so that 



Cape Cod 45 

passage can be made night or day. The cost was 
twelve million dollars. 

The oldest town on the Cape is Yarmouth, settled 
in 1639. Its men have been famous sea-faring folk, 
and in the days of the sailing-vessels they voyaged 
the world over. The majority became ship's officers, 
and a goodly number of them amassed wealth in the 
India and China trade. Nearly every other house in 
town used to be the home of a retired sea-captain. 

Provincetown, at the jumping-off tip of the Cape, 
has an ancient old-world look due to its narrow streets 
with houses, stores, and Httle shops crowded close 
along the walks. The place is odorous of the sea, 
and the waterside is lined with gray fish-shanties and 
storehouses. 

Back of Provincetown is a desert of sand dunes. 
These drifting sandhills have encountered patches of 
woodland in places, and covered the trees to their very 
tops. So lonely and desolate is the region that few 
people visit it, and there are natives of the town of 
mature years who have never crossed it to the other 
shore, less than three miles distant. 

The sand drifts like snow, and the Provincetown 
houses were formerly built on piles in order that the 
driving sand might pass under them. A traveller in 
1849 was told that the young ladies had a dexterous 
way of emptying their shoes at each step. 

It is stated in an old history that wheeled vehicles 
were such a rarity in the place that '*A lad who under- 



46 



New England 



stood navigating the ocean much better than land 
travel, on seeing a man driving a wagon in the street, 
expressed surprise at his being able to drive so straight 
without the assistance of a rudder." 

Beach grass has been planted by the government on 
some of the dunes to hold the sand in place. This grass 




Province town at the tip end of Cape Cod 

has an affiliation for sand, and you can stick one of 
its coarse wiry tufts in anywhere, and it will grow. If 
the grass is methodically planted the shifting dunes 
are fast bound so that the winds assail them in vain. 

It is an interesting fact that Cape Cod was the first 
land the Pilgrims saw after a voyage of more than nine 
weeks from England. On Saturday, November 21, 
1620, the Mayflower cast anchor in Provincetown 
harbor. A party went ashore that same day for wood 



Cape Cod 47 

and fresh water, and on Monday some of the women 
landed to wash clothes. 

Wednesday, sixteen of the men under Miles Standish 
set off to explore the country and were gone two days. 
They saw at a distance five or six natives and a dog, 
and they found several heaps of corn buried in the 
ground. When they returned, two of them bore a 
basket of the corn slung on a staff, and another of 
them brought the noose of an Indian deer trap that 
had caught him by the leg. 

About a fortnight later a second exploring party 
was gone for three days. They shot a number of 
geese and ducks, discovered some Indian graves, two 
empty wigwams, and more corn, ten bushels of which 
they brought away for planting. The next year, 
when several of them again visited the Cape, they 
sought out the owners of the corn and paid for what 
they had taken. 

One tragic incident of the Mayflower's stay at 
Provincetown was the falling overboard and drowning 
of the wife of William Bradford. 

While the vessel still lay in the harbor Peregrine 
White was born. He was called Peregrine to com- 
memorate the fact that the Pilgrims were still on their 
peregrinations, or travels. The General Court later 
honored this first English baby born in New England by 
giving him two hundred acres of land. He grew 
up to be a man of ability and lived to the age of eighty- 
four, " vigorous and comely to the last." 




Plymouth Rock and its protecting canopy 
Plymouth and the Pilgrims 

IN December, 1620, a party left the Mayflower, 
which was at Provincetown, and set out in the ship's 
shallop to explore the inner coast of Cape Cod. The 
shallop was a small vessel equipped with a mast and 

oars, and the party consisted of twelve Pilgrims and 

48 



Plymouth and the Pilgrims 49 

six of the ship's crew. In the afternoon of the third 
day of their voyage a sudden storm of snow and rain 
came on them, the sea grew dangerously rough, and 
their rudder broke. Afterward it was all that two men 
could do to steer with oars. To add to their troubles 
the mast snapped off, and the sail went overboard. 

They narrowly escaped being wrecked, but at last, 
when the short winter day had come to an end and 
darkness was about them, they found refuge in Plym- 
outh Bay and anchored under shelter of an island. 
They went on shore and with considerable difficulty 
started a fire. It was midnight before they could settle 
down with any comfort. The next day was spent in 
drying their clothing and goods, fixing their guns, 
resting, and giving God "thanks for their many 
deliverances." On the day following they kept "their 
Christian Sabbath." 

Monday, the twenty-first, they resumed their voy- 
aging and crossed the bay to the mainland. There 
they observed a great boulder, partly on the shore and 
partly in the water, at the foot of a steep sandy hill. 
It was the only rock on the wild shore for a long dis- 
tance, and it offered the voyagers a very welcome land- 
ing place, for they would be able to step out on it from 
their big clumsy boat without wading through the icy 
shallows. The coast here is sandy and without cliffs, 
and the presence of this solitary rock seems something 
of a mystery. Geologists say it was brought thither 
from the far north in the ice epoch by a mighty glacier. 



50 New England 

The landing of the Pilgrims on this rock is one of 
our treasured legends, and yet no rock is mentioned in 
any of the early accounts of what occurred at Plym- 
outh. Over a century had passed when a man 
ninety-four years old, who lived in the neighboring 
farm country, related that when he was a boy his 
father had told him the Pilgrims landed on the rock. 

At one time it served as a stepping stone at the door 
of a Plymouth warehouse. In 1774 an endeavor was 
made to remove it to the Town Square, but in trying 
to pry it out of the ground it was split. The upper 
portion was put on a sledge, and there was much 
huzzahing as twenty oxen dragged it up to the Square. 
There it was deposited at the foot of a liberty-pole 
on which flew a flag inscribed "Liberty or Death." 
Not until nearly a hundred years later was it taken 
back to be rejoined to the rest of the boulder. 

The boulder is now under an ornamental canopy 
of stone, and is protected from the ravages of relic 
hunters by iron gratings. But there are gates which 
are unlocked for visitors to allow access to the rock. 
Nearly every one wants to touch it, and now and then a 
woman will bend down and kiss it or make a child do so. 

The exploring party that landed from the Mayflower's 
shallop found springs of excellent water, and a clear 
brook which was broad enough at its mouth to afford a 
harbor for their boats. Nearly all the local Indians had 
recently died of an epidemic, and there were deserted 
fields on the high ground where they had raised corn. 



Plymouth and the Pilgrims 



The explorers returned to the Mayflower and rec- 
ommended this spot for a settlement, and the little 
vessel sailed over to Plymouth Bay. For a time most 
of the Pilgrims continued to dwell on her, and not until 
January 31 did they all disembark. April had come 
before the Mayflower sailed back to England. 

The first undertaking of the Pilgrims when, in 
midwinter, they started 'their settlement, was to build 
a large cabin for their common shelter. They finished 
it in about three weeks. It had hewn log walls and 
was twenty feet square. Twice, before the winter was 
over, the thatched roof caught on fire from sparks out 
of the chimney and was burned, leaving only the frame 
timbers, but 
each time the 
thatch was 
soon renewed. 

By spring 
seven separate 
family log huts 
were c o m- 
pleted. They 
were very small 
and rude, and 
were all alike. Oiled paper served instead of glass in 
the little window openings. 

Soon after the Pilgrims landed, Francis Billington 
climbed to the top of a tree and discovered a broad 
pond about two miles from the settlement. He mis- 




The pond which Francis Bilhngton mistook 
for a great sea 



52 New England 

took it for a great sea, and it has been called Billing- 
ton Sea ever since. 

While John Goodman and Peter Brown were cutting 
coarse grass and flags for thatch one winter day, they 
saw a deer and pursued it with the result that they got 
lost. They had no food, and all night they walked 
back and forth under a tree to keep from freezing. 
The weather was very cold ; and they were in great 
fear of wolves which they heard howling. It was late 
the next afternoon when they found their way back to 
the settlement. 

Several times during the first month the settlers 
saw in the distance smoke and fires which could have 
been made only by Indians, and on three occasions 
some of the natives themselves were seen. In April, 
while a council was being held, an Indian named 
Squanto walked in and accosted the gathering in Eng- 
lish. He was chief of a tribe living in Maine, where 
he had met many English fishermen, and one of their 
captains had carried him off across the ocean. Another 
captain brought him back and left him on Cape Cod. 
The Pilgrims were suffering for lack of food, and when 
Squanto saw their plight he went to catch eels for 
them, and he showed them where to fish. Through 
him a treaty of peace was made with Massasoit, the 
Indian sagamore of that region. 

There was much sickness among the settlers, and 
half the little band died the first winter. So fearful 
of the Indians were the survivors that in the spring 



Plymouth and the Pilgrims 



53 



they mournfully sowed a field of grain over the 
spot where the dead had been buried to prevent 
the savages from discovering the weakness of the 
settlement by counting the graves. 

The corn which 
they had found at 
various times and 
places had been 
carefully kept for 
seed, and the In- 
dian, Squanto, 
taught them to 
plant it when the 
new oak leaves 
were the size of a 
mouse's ear, and to 
place three herring 
in each hill with 
the seed for fertil- 
izer. This Indian 
helped them and 
lived with them 
the rest of his 
Hfe. 

In May the first wedding in the Pilgrim band 
took place when Edward Winslow married Susannah 
White. He had lost his wife in March, and she had 
lost her husband in February. 

One of the notable men of the colony was Miles 




A Pilgrim maiden on the beach 



^4 New England 

Standish. He was so short of stature that a neighbor 
in a moment of anger called him "Captain Shrimp." 
But, though undersized, he was robust, active, and dar- 
ing, and he was an experienced soldier. When arrayed 
for a warlike enterprise he wore a cloth garment 
which was thickly interwoven with wire, a breastplate, 
and a helmet. His wife died soon after arriving at 
Plymouth, and the captain presently decided to court 
Priscilla Mullins. In accord with the custom of the 
times, he sent a messenger to ask Mr. Mullins's per- 
mission to visit his daughter. The messenger was 
a young man named John Alden who was living in 
the captain's house. 

Alden went to Mr. Mullins with his request, and 
found that he had no objection to the captain's court- 
ing Priscilla provided she was willing. So Mr. Mullins 
sought the young lady and sent her in to confer with 
Alden. The messenger arose and courteously told 
his errand. When he finished. Miss Mullins, after a 
pause, fixed her eyes on him and said, "Prithee, John, 
why don't you speak for yourself?" 

He blushed and bowed and left the house, but soon 
came on another visit and spoke for himself so effec- 
tively that their wedding followed in a short time. The 
two have had many distinguished descendants, among 
whom are the poets Bryant and Longfellow. 

The first duel in New England was fought in June, 
162 1, with sword and dagger, by two Plymouth ser- 
vants. Both were wounded. 



Plymouth and the Pilgrims 55 

Two of the Pilgrims, with Squanto to guide them, 
went about forty miles to Swansea that summer to 
visit Massasoit. They presented him with a suit of 
clothes and some other articles. The few of his tribe 
who had escaped the plague were destitute and dirty. 

In the autumn the colonists harvested their corn, 
laid in a store of fish, and shot waterfowl, turkeys, and 
deer. 

One November morning the village sentry shouted, 
''Sail ho !" and the Fortune from England entered the 
bay. The settlers were ready with lumber, furs, 
and sassafras to the value of £500 to send back in her. 

Shortly afterward the Narragansetts, a large and 
powerful tribe living in Rhode Island, sent a messenger 
to Plymouth "with a bundle of arrows tied about with 
a great snakeskin." This was a threat and a challenge, 
and the Pilgrims responded by returning the snakeskin 
with bullets in it. That served to quench the ardor 
of the Narragansetts for war. They would not receive 
the snakeskin and the menacing bullets, but sent them 
back. 

As time went on other settlers came across the ocean 
to Plymouth, and at the end of four years it was a 
town of thirty- two houses. The dwellings were ranged 
along two streets, one of which ascended the hill from 
the shore of the bay, and was crossed by the other at 
right angles on the hillside. Where the streets met 
was the Town Square, on which stood four small 
cannon. The ends of the street were protected by 



^6 New England 

wooden gates which were fastened every night, and 
paHsades enclosed the town. 

The meeting-house was a large square flat-roofed 
blockhouse of thick sawn plank on what is now 
Burial Hill. It was also a fort, and six cannon were 
mounted on the roof. The people were called to ser- 
vice by the beating of a drum. During worship each 
man sat with his gun beside him, and a sentry was 
posted on the roof to keep a sharp lookout. 

The dwellings were a single story high, or at most 
one story and an attic. Earth was banked up around 
the foundation for the sake of warmth. The chimneys 
were built on the outside. Some of the floors were 
simply of hard- trodden earth, and the rest were made of 
planks roughly hewn out with axes. Probably none 
of the houses had more than three or four rooms. 
Much of the tableware was wooden. Guns, powder- 
horns, bullet-pouches, and swords hung on the walls. 
The people now possessed many swine and poultry, 
a number of goats, and at least two dogs. 

For food they depended in part on what they raised, 
and in part on the clams they got from the shore, the 
fish they caught in the sea, and the wild creatures they 
shot. When famine threatened in winter they dug 
groundnuts. 

In 1623 they were in much distress of mind over a 
drought that began the third week of May. The 
weather was almost continuously hot, and when the 
middle of July arrived without rain the corn began to 



Plymouth and the Pilgrims 



S7 



wither. A day was set apart to pray for relief. It 
opened as clear and hot as usual, but toward evening 




One of the old Plymouth streets 

the sky began to be overcast, and soon " such sweet and 
gentle showers" fell as caused the Pilgrims to rejoice 
and bless God. That was the first New England 
Thanksgiving. 

Plymouth long ago ceased to be a wilderness village, 
or even a rustic town. It is now a place of about ten 
thousand people, but it still retains an attractive 
savor of the olden times. Considerable manufactur- 
ing is carried on there, and it is a favorite summer 
resort. Something like fifty thousand people visit it 
every year. 

One of the most interesting spots in the place is 



58 New England 

Burial Hill. Here are the earliest marked graves. 
The oldest is that of a merchant who died in 1681. 
There are a number of very curious epitaphs. The 
following one refers to a Plymouth boy who died before 
he reached the age of two years : 

"Heaven knows what a man he might have 
MADE. But we know he died a most rare boy." 

Another inscription is this: "Here lies Interred 
The Body of Mrs. Sarah Spooner who deceased 
January ye 25TH a.d. 1767. She was widow 

TO 



The hand points to the next stone, which marks the 
grave of her husband. 

Here are two lines from the epitaph of Tabitha 
Plashet, written by herself : 

"Adieu, vain world, I've seen enough of thee; 

And I AM CARELESS WHAT THOU SAY ' ST OF ME." 

She was a rather eccentric person who, after her 
husband's death in 1794, taught a private school for 
young children. She did her spinning in the school- 
room, as was the custom of the day. One of her punish- 
ments was to pass skeins of yarn under the arms of the 
little culprits and hang them on nails. 




llisloric Faneuil Hall, "The Cradle of Liberty " 
Boston, Old and New 

BOSTON Harbor cuts deeply into the coast, and is 
bordered by various irregular peninsulas. The 
most central of the peninsulas is the one which the heart 
of the present city occupies. This was originally about 
two miles long and one broad. Coves indented it on 

50 



6o New England 

all sides ; there were hills and hollows, and several ponds 
and marshes. It has greatly changed in size and shape 
since then. Some of the hills have been entirely 
leveled, hollows have been filled, and land has been 
made where the coves and shallows along the shore used 
to be. 

Boston's first white settler was a young English 
clergyman named Blackstone. He came about 1624, 
and built a cabin on the west slope of Beacon Hill. 
There he lived alone. He started an orchard and had 
a rose garden, and his house contained a small library 
he had brought across the Atlantic. Apparently he 
did not care to have near neighbors, for when the Puri- 
tans, led by Governor Winthrop, arrived he did not 
long delay moving, and established a new home in the 
Rhode Island wilderness. 

Winthrop crossed the ocean in 1630, bringing nearly 
one thousand persons and a considerable number of 
horses and cattle in eleven ships. After stopping a 
few days at Salem, where a settlement had already been 
established, he sailed to Boston Harbor, and about the 
first of July landed at Charlestown. Here was a rude 
little village which had been started the previous year. 
The new-comers set up booths and tents and built 
cabins, but their provisions fell short, and there was 
much sickness. By the end of the hot summer nearly 
two hundred had died, and some of the others were 
so discouraged they went back to England in the re- 
turning ships. 



Boston, Old and New 6i 

Across the Charles River the settlers had the Boston 
peninsula in plain sight. They called it Trimountain 
or Tremont, a name suggested by its most prominent 
feature, which was a three-peaked hill near its centre. 
The springs at Charlestown were brackish, and, largely 
for the sake of a better water supply, most of Win- 
throp's colony moved across to Tremont in the autumn. 
Its name was soon changed to Boston in memory of 
an old town in England where some of them had lived. 
They called their colony the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 
Massachusetts was the name of a local tribe of Indians. 

The settlers built houses along the shores of a cove 
that indented the land from the east nearly to where the 
Old State House now stands. The first winter was a 
hard one, and by the end of February food supplies 
had run so low that a fast day was appointed. The 
people were reduced to an almost exclusive diet of clams 
and groundnuts, and Governor Winthrop's last loaf 
of bread was in the oven. He had arranged to have 
one of the ships that brought them across the ocean 
get provisions and return. By this time it was so 
long overdue that they had concluded it had been cap- 
tured by pirates, but now it arrived well stocked with 
provisions, and Boston celebrated its first Thanks- 
giving Day. 

The narrow neck of land by which the peninsula 
was connected with the mainland was bleak and deso- 
late, and exposed to the violence of the winter winds. 
It was no easy task for the inhabitants to keep a road 



62 New England 

in repair there above high- water mark, and in some 
instances travellers on the neck barely escaped 
drowning. 

The Bostonians erected first a fence across it, and 
later a fortification. There was a gate through which 
people passed back and forth . The gate was constantly 
guarded and was shut at a fixed hour in the evening. 
Indians were forbidden to enter the town with fire- 
arms or even sticks. 

On the central hill's highest peak the settlers put 
a beacon. This was a tall stout pole with footsticks 
on the sides to enable a man to climb to the top, 
where an arm projected with an iron cage hung on it. 
The cage was filled with pitch and pine wood which 
were set on fire if a night alarm needed to be given. 
For a daytime alarm a flag was hoisted. The old 
three-peaked height has been much reduced by grading, 
and it now all goes under the name of Beacon Hill. 

Boston's excellent harbor and central location caused 
it to develop early into the leading town in New Eng- 
land, politically and socially. At the end of its first 
century its waterside was edged with numerous docks 
and wharves, and back of these were winding streets 
and crooked alleys that followed the base of the hills 
or climbed the slopes at the easiest angle. The streets 
near the wharves were paved with cobblestones. 
Dwellings and shops were mostly of wood, and only 
one or two stories high, but varied much in color and 
the shape of their roofs. 



Boston, Old and New 



The best known building in modern Boston is the 
State House. Wherever you go into the city suburbs, 
if the weather is clear and sunny, you can see from far 
away its big gilded dome gleaming on the top of Beacon 
Hill. In the State House the governor has his offices, 
and there the legislature meets every year to make 
laws. It stands on land that was formerly a part of 
the cow pasture of the wealthy merchant and patriot 
leader, John 
Hancock. The 
front, which is 
considered a 
fine example of 
the architec- 
ture of its day, 
was finished in 
1798. 

A book by 
Oliver Wendell 
Holmes, one of 
the famous hterary men who have lived in the city, con- 
tains the statement that "Boston State House is the 
hub of the solar system." People said, "If that is so, 
then Boston itself must be the hub of the universe;" 
and the place has been known as " the Hub " ever since. 

Boston has been noted as a centre of learning in our 
country almost from the first, and there are many great 
libraries and educational institutions in the city and 
neighboring places. It is famous for its publishers and 




The Capitol on Beacon Hill 



64 



New England 



for the literary taste of its people, and its vicinity has 
been the dwelling place of a remarkable number of 
celebrated authors. 

One of these was Francis Parkman, whom many con- 
sider the best of our American historians. He was born 
in Boston in 1823. Not long after he finished his col- 
lege course he and a friend joined a tribe of the Dakotas, 
and spent several months beyond 
the Mississippi. They went as 
far west as the Rocky Moun- 
tains. His purpose was to ac- 
quaint himself with Indians who 
still lived primitively. That 
remarkably readable book of his 
for both old and young, "The 
Oregon Trail," is the record of 
his experiences. The hardships 
he endured on the trip made him 

T, ,,,,,,, T- a semi- invalid all the rest of his 

Ralph Waldo Emerson , . . 
hfe. 

Another great American of Boston origin was Emer- 
son, who was born there in 1803. When he was 
eight years old his father died, and the family was so 
poor that there were times when Ralph and his brother, 
Edward, had to share the use of one overcoat. Jeering 
school-fellows would ask, "Whose turn is it to wear 
the coat to-day?" 

The State House fronts on a corner of Boston Com- 
mon. The Common is a park of mild hills and hollows 




Boston, Old and New 65 

forty acres in extent, shaded with noble old elm trees, 
which are the pride of all Bostonians. Formerly the 
water of the Charles River lapped its western borders, 
but now the shore of the Back Bay has been pushed 
more than a mile away to the northward. This tract 
of made land is larger than all of the original peninsula. 

In the early days the Common was an almost tree- 
less, rocky, and barren pasture. People used to get 
stones from it with which to make their cellar walls, 
and the cows grazed there until after 1820. Wild 
roses and bayberry bushes grew on the hillsides. It 
contained marshes and several shallow ponds and four 
hills. Only the largest of the four hills now remains. 
This formerly had a powder house on it. 

One of the Common's important uses was as a parade 
ground for the militia. On the annual muster day 
all the train-bands of the country were there, and 
nearly all the townspeople, too. At such a time many 
booths and tents were set up along the borders for the 
sale of eatables and drinkables. 

On the Beacon Street side there used to be a Wishing 
Stone. The young people would walk around it nine 
times, then stand on it, or sit down on it, and wish. 
Their wishes would come true if they did not tell any 
one what they had wished. 

One of the most tragic incidents in the history of the 
Common occurred in the summer of 1728 when two 
young men fought a midnight duel on it. The elder 
was a bookseller's son. The younger, who was only 



66 



New England 



twenty, was the son of a clergyman. They quarrelled 
over cards at a tavern, and resorted to the Common, 
where they fought with swords. The younger fell, 
mortally wounded. The other took refuge on a frigate 
in the harbor which sailed at daybreak for France. 
There he died of grief within a year. 

The Common had a gallows on it and was a place of 
public execution. Pirates have been hung there, and 
Quakers have suffered the death penalty for their 
faith. When the British troops were quartered in the 
town, at least one of them was shot on the Common by 




Boston Common 



a file of his comrades for deserting. All these victims 

lie somewhere beneath the sod there in unknown graves. 

Near the centre of the Common is a stone-rimmed 

body of water known as the Frog Pond. The old-time 



Boston, Old and New 67 

Boston boys used to slide down hill on to this pond, 
and they heaped up the snow to make a steeper descent. 
Just before the Revolution, the English soldiers who 
were camped on the Common destroyed the slides 
again and again while the boys were gone to school. 
The boys protested in vain to the soldiers, and then 
went to their general and complained. He asked 
who sent them. 

"Nobody sent us, sir," one of them replied. "Your 
soldiers have spoiled our snow-slides and broken the 
ice where we skate. When we complained to them, 
they called us young rebels, and told us to help our- 
selves if we could. Now we will bear it no longer." 

The general turned to an officer and exclaimed, 
"Good heavens! the very children draw in a love 
of liberty with the air they breathe." 

Then he assured the boys that if any of the soldiers 
molested them again, they would be severely punished. 

A short walk from the Frog Pond are several historic 
churches. One of these is the Park Street Church, 
whose slender spire overlooks the Common from "Brim- 
stone Corner." In this church our national hymn 
" America " was first sung in 1832 as part of the program 
for the celebration of the Fourth of July. 

Not much more than a stone's throw away is King's 
Chapel, where the British officials and loyalist gentry 
worshipped in colonial days. Close to each of these 
buildings is an ancient cemetery with its lowly gray 
stones. Some say that in the King's Chapel church- 



68 New England 

yard the notorious pirate, Captain Kidd, lies buried. 
Before his reputation became as black as it did later, 
he was employed by the colonial governor of New 
England and certain others to go on a voyage to catch 
pirates. After a while rumors came that he had him- 
self turned pirate. However, in a few years he ap- 
peared in Boston and delivered to the governor the 
treasure he had acquired in capturing various ships. 
This included iiii ounces of gold, 2353 ounces of 
silver, 57 bags of sugar, and 41 bales of goods. 

Orders came from England for his arrest, and he 
was locked up in Boston Jail. This was in 1699. 
The prison was a gloomy building with thick stone 
walls, ponderous oaken doors, and dark passages; 
and the keys that the jailer carried at his girdle weighed 
from one to three pounds each. Captain Kidd was later 
sent to London, where he was tried and hung. How his 
body happens to be in King's Chapel churchyard is 
not explained, but the statement is made that if a 
person will visit his tomb there at midnight, tap on it 
three times, and ask in a whisper, " Captain Kidd, for 
what were you hung?" the pirate will answer nothing. 

Another famous church in this vicinity is the Old 
South Meeting-house at the corner of Washington 
and Milk streets. It stands on what was once Governor 
Winthrop's garden. When the British were besieged 
in the town they turned the building into a riding- 
school. The furniture was cut to pieces and removed, 
and the floor covered with dirt and gravel. Deacon 



Boston, Old and New 



69 



Hubbard's beautiful carved pew, with its silk up- 
holstery, was carried off by an officer to be made into 
a pigsty. 

Just across Milk Street from this church there used 
^to be a little two-story wooden dwelling which was the 
birthplace of Benjamin 
Franklin. He was the 
fifteenth of his father's 
seventeen children. 
An older brother was 
a printer, and Ben- 
jamin was apprenticed 
to him to learn the 
trade. But at the age 
of seventeen he secretly 
left home and made his 
way, partly by sea 
and partly by land, to 
Philadelphia, where he 
won fame and fortune. 

One of the quaintest 
of Boston's buildings 
is the Old State House 
at the head of what 
was King Street in colonial days. Here the pioneers 
built their first church. It was a small one-story 
building with plastered stone walls and a thatched 
roof. In King Street were located the stocks, pillory, 
and whipping-post. The children could look out of 




rhe Old South Church 



70 



New England 




the neighboring public schools and see the punish- 
ments inflicted, and there would usually be a curious 
crowd in the street gathered about the spot. Some- 
times women were 
brought there from 
prison in a cage 
on a cart. Then 
they were tied to the 
red-painted whip- 
ping-post and given 
thirty or forty lashes 
on their backs. The 
pillory was on a 
platform, and when 
a man had his hands 
and head made fast 
in it he had to stand, 
scarcely able to 
move, exposed to 
insulting words, and 
perhaps pelted with 
rotten eggs and gar- 
bage. The stocks 
were about as bad, 
for, though the culprit sat down, his legs were gripped 
tight between two blocks of wood. 

It was just below the Old State House that the Boston 
Massacre occurred in 1770. The Bostonians were feel- 
ing a good deal irritated because two regiments of 



:iMiiGi ? 



The Old State House at the head of 
what used to be King Street in 
colonial days. In the lower right- 
hand corner of the picture is the 
spot where the Boston Massacre 
occurred, March 5, 1770 



Boston, Old and New yi 

British soldiers were quartered in the town, and about 
eight o'clock on the evening of March fifth a group of 
boys gathered around a British sentinel on the snow-cov- 
ered King Street, and began taunting him. Presently 
he struck a barber's apprentice, who was one of the lads, 
a blow with his musket, and the boy went off crying. 

About the same time a crowd, which had collected 
near the barracks on Brattle Street, got into a scuffie 
with the soldiers there. Then some men lifted a boy 
through a church window, and he rang the bell. The 
citizens in their homes thought this was an alarm of 
fire, and they came flocking forth with their fire buckets. 
As several of them were passing the sentinel in the 
square below the State House, the barber's apprentice 
came along and called out, "That man knocked me 
down with the butt end of his gun !" 

The crowd then began to pelt the sentinel with snow- 
balls, and the more aggressive shouted, "Kill him!" 

Soon a captain with seven privates came to his 
rescue, and confronted the angry crowd of fifty or sixty 
unarmed men. The latter pressed up to the very 
muzzles of the guns, and they threw snow in the sol- 
diers' faces, shouting, "Fire if you dare !" and "Come 
on, you lobster-backs !" 

Suddenly some of the guns were discharged, instantly 
killing four men and wounding seven others, two of 
whom afterward died. The mob turned and fled, 
as all mobs are apt to do. 

The drums beat now, and an entire regiment marched 



72 New England . 

into the street, and the whole town swarmed to the 
place. But after the soldiers concerned in the firing 
had been arrested, things quieted down. When the 
soldiers were tried all were acquitted except two, who 
were sentenced to be branded on the open hand. 

A few streets northerly is Faneuil Hall, " the Cradle 
of Liberty," so called because in it the colonists held 
many public meetings when the struggle with the 
mother country was approaching. It has always been 
a combination of hall above and market below from the 
time that Peter Faneuil built and presented it to the 
town. About twenty years later, in 1763, the interior 
was destroyed by a fire, and the funds for rebuilding 
were supplied by a lottery. 

The market gardeners, whose covered wagons laden 
with vegetables and fruit are arranged every week- 
day in orderly rows beside the great building, come 
from all the country around. Some are from places 
thirty-five miles away and have started at nightfall, 
or earlier on the previous day. They begin to arrive 
by midnight and keep coming until the day dawns. 
After getting their wagons into position and stabling 
their horses, the early comers drowse away the rest of 
the night in some comfortable corner. But when the 
darkness begins to pale they uncover their loads, and 
customers soon appear. The scene becomes more 
and more animated, until it is difficult to find one's 
way about among the carts and the eager bargainers. 

At sunrise a gong strikes, and the great building 



Boston, Old and New /3 

itself is opened to trade. There is a central walk 
through it lined with stalls in charge of white-frocked 
men. 

As soon as the produce in the wagons that come in 
from the country has all been sold, the drivers start 
homeward, sometimes quite early, but, if trade has 
been slow, not until late in the day. 

Boston's early settlers soon established at the north 
end of the peninsula a village which was quite distinct 
from the one near Beacon Hill. This is a crowded 
foreign section of the city now, and one portion of it 
is known as "Little Italy." Here still stands the Old 
North Meeting-house, famous for its connection with 
Paul Revere's Ride. On the evening of April i8, 1775, 
he left the town in a boat, and from the other shore 
of the Charles River watched until two signal lanterns 
displayed in its belfry informed him that the British 
troops in Boston were about to cross the river to make a 
night raid and capture the military stores at Concord. 

A little distance from the old church, fronting 
on the waterside, is Copp's Hill, now graded down so 
that it is much lower and less steep than formerly. It 
had a windmill on its top in the early days. During 
the siege of Boston the British threw up a redoubt there 
with a parapet made of barrels filled with earth. 

In this \Ticinity lived Mother Cary, the witch. Once, 
when rosemary was in great demand as a medicine for 
asthma, and none was to be had in the town, she is 
said to have made a trip to Bermuda and back in an 



74 



New England 



egg-shell in a single night to obtain a supply of the 
plant. 

Another old woman of this part of the town had nine 
cats which she was in the habit of consulting to enable 

her to give information as 
to where stolen goods were 
secreted. 

Charlestown is now a 
part of Boston, and is 
connected by bridges with 
the peninsula. On one 
of its heights rises the 
granite shaft of Bunker 
Hill Monument, which 
commemorates the famous 
battle fought there. The 
corner-stone was laid by 
Lafayette in 1825, and 
Daniel Webster was the 
orator of the occasion, as 
he was also when the completion of the monument 
was celebrated in 1843. Inside of the shaft is a 
spiral stairway of two hundred and ninety-five stone 
steps, up which one can climb to the top. The material 
used in constructing the monument is granite from 
Quincy, and the cost was met by popular subscription. 
Roundabout are city streets solidly lined with buildings. 
Aside from Bunker Hill, one of Charlestown's most 
notable claims to distinction is the fact that Samuel 




Bunker Hill Monument 



Boston, Old and New 75 

Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, was born there 
in 1 791. He became a leading American painter, but 
was interested in chemistry, and in 1832 began devising 
apparatus to send electric messages. Three years later 
he exhibited the telegraph, operating with half a mile 
of wire . After struggling along under serious privations 
for eight years more, he succeeded in getting an appro- 
priation from Congress to build an experimental line 
between Washington and Baltimore. The number 
and character of the honors heaped on him in recog- 
nition of the value of his invention have probably 
never been equalled in the case of any other Amer- 
ican. 

Within a ten-mile circle drawn around Boston dwell 
half the inhabitants of the "Old Bay State," and they 
constitute one-fourth of the entire population of New 
England. Boston is an important manufacturing 
city. It is the greatest American market for leather 
and leather goods. As a wool market it is unsurpassed 
except by London, and wool is brought there in immense 
quantities from all over the world. 

The older business part of the city is a maze of narrow 
crooked streets in which the stranger easily loses his 
way. These streets are said to follow the routes of the 
old lanes and cow paths that were made when the place 
was a country village. 

In the adjacent region are many beautiful suburban 
towns. The finest of these is Brookline, which is a 
paradise of splendid estates. In the early days its 



76 



New England 



name was Muddy River, and the Boston merchants 
pastured their swine and cows there in the summer. 

The city has suffered from various serious fires. 
In its first century it had a "great fire" about once in 
ten years on an average. But its most notable fire 
disaster occurred in November, 1872. The fire was 



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The Boston Public Library 



started in the early morning by a spark snapped from a 
furnace in the business section. The horses of the fire 
department were sick with a distemper, which was a 
great handicap to the department's efficiency. Sixty- 
five acres were burned over, nearly eight hundred 
buildings were destroyed, there were thirteen deaths, 
and the property loss was seventy million dollars. 



Boston, Old and New 77 

The city is an almost ideal seaport. It lies well 
back in a bay that is protected from the ocean storms 
by two long slender arms of the land, one reaching 
southward and the other northward, with a deep 
channel between. On the outer side of the northward- 
reaching peninsula is Nantasket Beach, the most 
popular of Boston's seashore resorts. When the white 
men came it was the playground of the savages. The 
Indians would erect a pole on the beach, and hang it 
with beaver skins; and the swarthy braves ran races 
and played football to win these trophies. Their wild 
shouts could be heard above the roar of the breakers. 



Boston Light. Here was crtcl-cd in 171(3 the Ijr-l Aiiicrican 
lighthouse. The present tower was built in 1783 

The harbor is dotted with islands. One little island 
near the entrance is known as Nix's Mate, and on it 



78 New England 

there used to be a gibbet especially for pirates. Most of 
them, after they had been hung, were buried on the 
island in the sand, but whenever a ringleader paid the 
penalty of his villainy here, he was left hanging in 
irons from the gibbet, so that sailors coming into port 
would see the skeleton and take warning. 

The best-known episode in the harbor's history 
is that of the Boston Tea Party. The British govern- 
ment was trying to force the Americans to pay taxes 
on the tea that was imported. But the Americans 
insisted that they could not be taxed without their 
consent. Many of them stopped drinking the foreign 
tea, and they would not use any kind of goods manu- 
factured in Britain on which a tax was collected. 
They dressed in American homespun, and drank only 
tea that was smuggled in from Holland, or that which 
was made of sage, sassafras roots, and other things from 
their own gardens and woodlands. 

On December 16, 1773, seven thousand people 
gathered in and around the Old South Meeting-house 
to protest against the landing of the cargoes of three 
tea-laden ships which had recently arrived in the harbor 
and lay beside what is now the Liverpool Wharf. 
The meeting was still in session at five o'clock in the 
afternoon, and candles had been lighted. A last appeal 
was sent to the governor, and he refused to act. 

Meanwhile one hundred men had smeared their 
faces with soot in a neighboring tavern, and befeathered 
themselves like savage warriors. Now they appeared 



Boston, Old and New 79 

outside of the meeting-house and gave a tremendous 
war-whoop. The people at once poured forth and saw 
the Indians hurrying down Milk Street toward the 
harbor, brandishing hatchets and shouting as they ran 
along. The crowd followed. 

It was a moonlit evening, and the Indians had no 
difficulty in seeing to get aboard the three vessels. 
They told the frightened captains and crews to go below 
and stay there, and the ships' people dared not disobey. 
So the marauders were left free to take off the hatches 
and get the tea-chests up out of the holds. Then they 
broke open the chests and threw them overboard, or 
emptied their contents into the harbor. The Indians 
and onlookers were orderly, and there was little noise 
except for the blows of the hatchets. By nine o'clock 
the work was done, and three hundred and forty-two 
chests of tea valued at one hundred thousand dollars 
had been destroyed. The Indians marched back to 
the town to the music of a fife. 

There were only one or two incidents to mar the 
affair. A Charlestown man in the crowd on the 
wharf thought he would get some tea to carry home. 
So he went on board a ship and slyly stuffed as much as 
possible into his coat pockets and inside of the lining. 
An Indian named Hewes observed what he was doing, 
and as he was lea\ang the ship sprang forward and 
grabbed hold of his coat. The man made a jump and 
left his coat-tails behind him. Hewes called out to 
tell the people what the man had done, and every one 



8o New England 

who could get near enough helped him along off the 
wharf with a kick. The next day his coat-tails were 
nailed to the whipping-post in Charlestown. 

One of the old towns that has been annexed to Boston 
is Roxbury, so called because much of the land in it 
is rocky, and originally spelled Rocksbury. The rocks 
are a kind of conglomerate known as pudding-stone, 
for which Oliver Wendell Holmes accounts as follows : 

"In Dorchester there lived a giant who had a wife 
and three children. On election day he locked them 
up and strode away, leaving them an election pudding 
to eat. They were very angry, and instead of eating 
their pudding, 

"They flung it over to Roxbury Hills, 
They flung it over the plain ; 
And all over Milton and Dorchester too 
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw. 

"Ages have passed away since, the lumps of pudding 
with the plums in them have turned to stone, and 
there they lie." 

The town's first minister was John Eliot, "the 
Apostle of the Indians." He learned their language 
with the help of a young Pequot who had been taken 
prisoner, and presently was able to preach to them with- 
out an interpreter. He visited all the Indians in 
Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies and lived to see 
twenty-four of them fellow-preachers of the gospel. 
In one of his letters he says, "I have not been dry, 



Boston, Old and New 8i 

night or day, from the third day of the week to the 
sixth." At night he would pull off his boots and 
wring out his stockings, and in the morning put them 
on and continue his travels. 

No other missionary had such an influence as he 
over the savages, and he did what he could to have 
them treated justly by the whites. For a long time he 
was engaged in translating the Bible into the Indian 
tongue. 

Eliot occasionally preached to the Indians from a 
rocky pulpit in the local woods. This pulpit was on 
what became later the famous Brook Farm, where some 
of the most notable men and women in America once 
Uved and cultivated the land and their brains. Often 
a party of them would resort to the woodland on a 
pleasant Sabbath afternoon in summer and address 
each other from Ehot^s pulpit. It was canopied by a 
birch tree through which the cheerful sunbeams sifted. 

People used to laugh at the spectacle of rustic 
philosophers hoeing out wisdom and potatoes at the 
same time, and the neighbors said that the Brook 
Farmers once raised five hundred tufts of burdock, 
mistaking them for cabbages. 

The story is told, too, that on washing days the men 
were likely to be called on to hang out the clothes ; 
and in the evening, when the company gathered for 
recreation and began to dance, the clothespins fell 
plentifully from the masculine pockets. 




A quiet evening in Gloucester Harbor 
The Fishermen 

LONG before the interior of New England had 
been at all thoroughly explored there was a 
large fishing industry off its coast. Hundreds of vessels 
came across the Atlantic to these waters to fish every 
year even as early as 1600 ; and when settlers began to 
82 



The Fishermen 83 

establish themselves along the shore, they were fisher- 
men as well as farmers. Indeed, many of the settlers 
measured their crops by pounds of fish and barrels 
of clams rather than by bushels of corn. It was 
chiefly the abundant supply of cod, mackerel, halibut, 
shad, sahnon, and other fish in the ocean and the rivers 
that enabled the pioneers to escape starvation. 

The numerous bays and inlets and streams furnished 
good spawning grounds, and the rocky coast and shallow 
adjacent waters were conducive to the growth of sea- 
weed, among which the fishes found a plentiful supply 
of small animal food. The best-known portion of the 
coastal shallows is the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. 
On this ocean highland millions of dollars' worth of fish 
are caught every year. New England has over sixteen 
hundred fishing vessels, which employ twenty-two 
thousand men. Fish used to be abundant near the 
shore, and the fishermen could catch them by going 
out in small boats ; but now it is necessary to seek them 
at a considerable distance, and the vessels used are 
large and staunch. Some of them voyage as far as 
Greenland and Iceland. 

For three miles out from the shore fishing can be 
done only by boats of that nation to which the shore 
belongs. No Canadian nor European boats can fish 
within that limit off our coast, and none of our boats 
can fish inside of that limit on the coast of Nova 
Scotia or Newfoundland. Outside of this shore line 
the fishing is free to all nations alike. 



84 New England 

Most of the fishing in the three-mile strip of water is 
done by single fishermen who dwell along the coast. 
Each man has his own dory and is out on the sea fishing 
every day when the weather permits. Very likely his 
home is simply a shanty with a little garden near it by 
the borders of a cove that serves as a harbor for his 
boat. Early in the morning, perhaps before dawn, he 
goes out in his boat, with a sail hoisted in the prow, if 
there is wind, or pulhng at the oars if no breeze is 
stirring. He examines his lobster pots, nets, and 
trawls, takes whatever he has caught into the dory, 
and does such rebaiting as is necessary. Most of the 
fish caught by these men are sold fresh in the towns on 
or near the coast. 

Gloucester has become the most important fishing 
port in New England. It has a deep and spacious 
harbor, and is conveniently near that great centre of 
trade and population, Boston. The fishermen have 
always been notably bold, vigorous, and intelligent, 
ready to face danger and the severest strain of toil. 
Through long and hard experience they become 
skilful seamen and shipmasters, and in our wars, 
when service on the sea was called for, these fishermen 
have proved of great value to their country. 

The demand for fishermen to go on cruises from 
Gloucester far exceeds the local supply, and many of 
them are now from Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and 
even from the Azores across the sea. 

Fishing on the Banks is largely carried on by fast- 



The Fishermen 



85 



sailing well-equipped schooners. They carry fresh 
vegetables, frozen meats, and canned goods to eat, and 
the crew has the best of fare. It requires three or 
four months to lay in a cargo of cod. The decision as 
to just where a schooner shall fish depends a great 
deal on the depth of the water and the character of 
the bottom. By constant sounding with the lead 
line an expert 
captain gets to 
know the realm 
beneath the 
waters very 
thoroughly. 
The lead has 
a hollow at its 
lower extrem- 
ity in which a 
little grease is 
inserted, so 
that a sample 

of the sea bottom may be secured. The story is 
told of a certain old Nantucket skipper who could 
invariably tell just where his vessel was by examining 
the soil his lead brought up. In order to perplex 
him his crew once put some garden loam from the 
home island in the cup of the lead, made a pretence 
of sounding, and then asked the skipper to name the 
position of the schooner. The old fisherman tasted 
the dirt on the lead — his favorite method of deter- 




A fishing schooner on its way to the 
Grand Banks 



86 New England 

mining its individuality — and suddenly exclaimed, 
"Nantucket's sunk, and here we are right over Ma'am 
Hackett's garden !" 

As soon as a captain finds satisfactory fishing ground 
he drops anchor. If the fish are very numerous and 
hungry, the men may fish with hook and line from the 
deck of the schooner ; but usually the dories are hoisted 
overboard, and, with two men in each, go out to set 
the trawls. Only the captain and cook remain on the 
vessel. A trawl is a line about a mile long from which 
a thousand hooks hang on shorter lines two or three 
feet in length. One man pulls at the oars, and the 
other baits the hooks and drops them over. At each 
end of the trawl is a big float, and these floats are 
marked with the vessel's name. They are anchored, 
and the line is lowered to the bottom. In fine weather 
the dories go out early every day to take up the trawls. 
A boat starts at one end of a trawl, and as fast as the 
men remove the fish from the hooks and put on fresh 
bait they throw the line overboard. This work has 
to be done with bare hands even in freezing weather. 

When the boats return they are swung to the deck, 
and the fish are thrown into a bin. The cleaning and 
packing them in the hold are done after supper. 

Fishing on the Banks continues all the year round. 
The region is chilly and foggy, and in winter its dreari- 
ness and danger are increased by frequent gales and 
snowstorms. If sky or sea show any hint of threatening 
weather while a schooner's crew is out, a recall signal is 



The Fishermen 87 

hoisted. But sometimes the gale rises so suddenly 
that one or more of the dories to leeward fail to get 
back. The strong tides of the Banks and the shoal 
waters help to pile up the great combing seas, and not 
infrequently a dory with two dead bodies in it, or 
empty and perhaps tossed bottom up by the waves, 
is all that tells the story of a lost boat and its crew. 
WTien the schooner on which the lost men sailed 
returns to port, it enters the harbor with its flag at 
half-mast. 

At times a large number of fishing vessels may anchor 
near each other on a favorable fishing ground. Perhaps 
a storm arises, and an anchor gives way so that a 
schooner drives before the gale against another, wreck- 
ing both of them. Or one of the swift steamships that 
cross the Banks on a voyage between America and 
Europe suddenly looms up out of a fog and crushes a 
schooner that happens to lie in its path. 

As soon as the fish which a vessel has brought to 
port are unloaded the captain gets a check for them. 
A fourth of one per cent goes to the Widows' and Or- 
phans' Fund, and three quarters of the balance is for the 
fishermen after expenses have been deducted. Cap- 
tain and all share exactly alike in the division except 
the cook, who is given ten dollars extra because the 
success of the voyage depends more on him than on 
any one else. If he is not kept good-natured he will 
waste food and fresh water, and compel an early return 
to port. 



88 



New England 



The rest of the money is turned over to the owners 
of the vessel. They, however, give the captain from 
three to ten per cent of it. 

A vessel usually lies in port only two or three days 
and then starts on another cruise. Some firms own 
dozens of vessels, but it is not the owners who go forth 
on them after fish. They equip the schooners with 
the necessary apparatus, and send them out one by one 
in charge of a captain who has selected a crew. It is 
for the interest of every man concerned to work effi- 
ciently to make a profitable voyage, and this fishing 
industry is a most satisfactory instance of cooperation 




"Old Mother Ann," on Eastern Point, Cape Ann 

between labor and capital. There are no strikes, and, 
in spite of hardship and danger, the profits and the 



The Fishermen 89 

independence and excitement of the Ufe offer induce- 
ments to engage in fishing which cannot be resisted. 

Halibut are caught with hook and Une or with 
trawls much as cod are, for both are fish that live at 
the sea bottom and cannot be taken with seines. Some 
of the halibut weigh several hundred pounds. Most of 
them are sold fresh, but a considerable amount of 
salted halibut is smoked by being hung for several days 
in smoke houses where fires of oak chips are burning. 

Many of the schooners leave port well supplied with 
ice and bring back their fish packed in it. From the 
vessels the fish are transferred to cold storage plants 
and are sent away in refrigerator cars so that they are 
kept fresh for weeks or months. Nearly all of the cod, 
however, arrive from the fishing-grounds salted in the 
holds of the vessels. They are taken out, split, and 
put to soak in hogsheads of brine on the wharf. Later 
they are spread to dry on flakes, which are slatted 
benches that allow the air to reach both sides of the 
fish. The process requires about a week and reduces a 
five-pound fish to two pounds. After the fish have been 
thoroughly dried they will not spoil for a long time, 
and they are sent away to be sold as salted codfish ; 
or the skin and bones are carefully removed, and the 
flesh is packed in boxes and marketed as boneless or 
shredded cod. 

Another important food fish is the mackerel. They 
swim together near the surface in large schools of many 
thousands. The fishermen cruise about after them in 



90 New England 

their swift two-masted schooners. When the lookout 
sights a good-sized school, the crew leap into the great 
seine boats and extend a net in front of the fish. Then 
they bring the ends together behind the school. The 
upper side of the net is supported by cork floats and 
the lower side is kept down by lead weights. The 
school may sink and escape, but all hands strain at a 
rope which passes through pulleys at the under edge 
of the net. Soon the net is pulled together into a 
great pocket, and the mackerel are entrapped. The 
schooner then comes alongside, and by means of 
dipnets the fish are taken on board. 

The mackerel are pursued by larger fish, among which 
the swordfish and bluefish are the most valuable. They 
disappear in winter, and where they go is a mystery' ; 
but the next year they appear coming shoreward as 
the surface waters get warmer. 

When a vessel goes after swordfish, the crew locate 
their prey by the dorsal fins, which appear above the 
surface as the fish swim along. The moment one of 
these fins is sighted the vessel starts in pursuit, and, 
when close enough, a man on a little platform at the 
prow harpoons the fish. Away the wounded creature 
goes, and men in dories follow and despatch it. Occa- 
sionally a swordfish turns on its pursuers and jabs 
its weapon through their boat. After that, they 
reach their vessel as best they can. 




The Pansy, an old-time Salem merchantniau 
On the Massachusetts Coast 

NEXT to Plymouth the oldest place in New Eng- 
land is Salem, "The Witch City." It was begun 
in 1626 by a little band of English farmers and fisher- 
men, who moved to the spot from the bleak shores of 
Cape Ann. Two years later they were joined by Cap- 



92 New England 

tain John Endicott and a hundred adventurers from 
England. 

At first the place retained its Indian name of Naum- 
keag, and then the settlers called it Salem, which means 
peace. It was on a neck of land between two rivers, 
and the colonists crossed the streams in canoes that 
they made by hollowing out pine logs. The canoes 
were about two and a half feet broad and twenty feet 
long, and in them the settlers would sometimes go 
fowling as much as two leagues out to sea. Every 
household had one or two of these water-horses. 

For a long time Salem ranked next to Boston as 
the largest and richest place in New England. It was 
a great seaport and a centre for the coast fisheries. 
At the age of fourteen the Salem boy of those days b6gan 
sea life in the cabin of his father's vessel. In his 
twenties he was likely to become a captain, and a 
score of years later he retired to a stately mansion in 
his native place. Swarthy, tattooed sailors with gold 
rings in their ears were seen month after month un- 
loading from the great Indiamen bales of merchandise 
fragrant with the spicy odors of far-away lands. Every 
voyage of these big ships had possibilities of perilous 
storms, and encounters with pirates and cannibals, 
and their going and coming were fraught with a spirit 
of mystery and adventure. 

Later, when the Salem shipping had declined, some 
of the mariners still lingered about the waterside reeling 
off the saltiest salt tales of the town's grand old times, 



On the Massachusetts Coast 93 

accompanied by a shake of the head at the change, with 
good ships and warehouses rotting, and nothing but 
landlubbers about. 

As shipping declined manufacturing came in, and 
a large business has developed in the making of cotton 
goods, machinery, shoes, and lumber products. 

One of the most interesting of Salem's colonial relics 
is the little church built for Roger Williams, who came 
to the settlement to be its pastor when it was three 
years old. The size of the building, 17 by 20 feet, 
makes one somewhat doubtful of the familiar state- 
ment that everybody went to church in those times. 
It was not only a house of worship, but the place where 
the colonial government held some of its meetings, and 
the structure was also used for a watch-house. When a 
new meeting-house was erected the old one served for 
a schoolhouse. 

Another building that all strangers wish to see is 
"The Witches' House. " This was the residence of one 
of the judges before whom appeared for examination 
those poor creatures who were accused of being witches. 
Belief in witches was at that time quite common, and 
they were said to make frequent journeys along the 
coast riding on broomsticks. The delusion created 
more turmoil with more fatal results at Salem than 
anywhere else in the colonies, yet its tragic period there 
lasted only about six months in the year 1692. The 
excitement started in the minister's family in Feb- 
ruary. His two Uttle girls acted strangely, and accused 



94 New England 

an Indian woman who worked for the family of be- 
witching them ; her husband accused others, and there 
was a great uproar in the place, which at that time had 
only seventeen hundred inhabitants. Every one be- 
came suspicious, and those whose words and ways 
were at all unusual were thought to be either afflicted 
by witches or to be witches themselves. When Bridget 
Bishop was being led through the streets to her trial 
past the meeting-house she gave a look toward the 
building, and immediately an invisible demon entered it, 
and there was a sound of tearing which made the 
people run in to learn the cause of the noise. They 
found that a board, which had been strongly nailed on, 
had been transported to another part of the building. 

This Bridget Bishop was the first witch condemned. 
She was hung in June. The next month five witches 
were hung on one day, and the same number on a day 
in August, while in September a group of eight were 
hung together, and a well-to-do farmer, eighty-one years 
old, was put to death by placing hea\y stones on his 
body. At the outskirts of the village was a hill with a 
bare rocky stretch of several acres on its summit, 
and there the scaffold was erected on which the 
witches were hung. 

No more persons were executed after September, 
but early the next year many were tried and three were 
condemned to death. However, in May, these three 
were set free in a general delivery, together with about 
one hundred and fifty others accused of witchcraft. 



On the Massachusetts Coast 95 

Salem is the native place of the great novelist, 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the house in which he was 
born in 1804 still stands. Not far from his birthplace 
is the House of the Seven Gables to which the family 
moved when the boy was four years old. His father 
had recently died at a distant port while on a voyage in 
the ship Nabhy, of which he was captain. Hawthorne 
was so shy in 
his young man- 
hood that he 
seldom went 
out except at 
twilight, or 
only to resort 
to the nearest 
solitude, which 
was usually 
the seashore. 
F ^pn after he ^^^ House of Seven Gables, where Hawthorne 
once lived, and which he immortalized in one 
was famous of ^^jg j^Qg^ famous novels 

some one writ- 
ing of his appearance at public gatherings says, " He 
has the look all the time of a rogue who finds himself 
in a company of detectives." 

For a time he was the collector of the port and 
labored daily at the custom house, and, though it was 
said, that "he never could add up figgers," he on the 
whole performed well his uncongenial task. 

Salem, like many another American city, has had its 






96 



New England 



great fire. This started in a leather factory early in 
the afternoon of June 25, 191 4, after a long dry spell. 
So rapidly did the flames spread through the building 
that the men and women employed there barely escaped 
with their fives. Other buildings caught on fire, and 

help was summoned 
from a score of neigh- 
boring places. Buildings 
were dynamited to stop 
the flames, but the wind 
spread the embers, and 
when the fire was gotten 
under control late in the 
day, it had swept over two 
hundred and fifty-three 
acres, destroyed nearly 
fourteen hundred build- 
ings, and left twenty 
thousand people home- 
less. Sixty persons were 
injured, several were burned to death, and others died 
from excitement. 

Only a few miles from Salem is Marblehead, on a 
bold headland that reaches out into the sea. It has 
an excellent harbor, and its inhabitants were fishermen 
for many generations. Life on the sea produces a 
hardy race and a peculiar one, and the old-time Marble- 
header was recognized by his manner, gait, and speech, 
far beyond his home neighborhood. The houses closest 




Nathaniel Hawthorne 



On the Massachusetts Coast 



97 



to the sea were severely plain and weather-beaten, 
and were jumbled together along lane-like streets. 
Other houses were built on or against the rocky ridges 
which extend through the thickly settled parts of the 
town. Some of these would run up the face of a rock 
two or three stories and have an extra story on top of 
the ledge, or would start with the front at a ledge- top 
and descend several stories down at the back. Often 
long flights of steps up a succession of terraces led to the 




Marblehead's rocky shore 



house door. Most of these picturesque buildings have 
disappeared since the town has changed from a fishing- 
place to a manufacturing centre and summer resort. 



98 



New England 



The only important outthrust of this northern coast 
is Cape Ann, which Captain John Smith named Traga- 
bigzanda in honor of a Turkish lady whose slave he had 
been at Constantinople. 

One of the most charming of the old coast towns 
is Newburyport, at the mouth of the Merrimack River. 




Eagle Head and the shore at Manchester, where the waves 
make such music that this is called " The Singing Beach " 

A very appropriate industry of the place is the manu- 
facture of silver goods in colonial designs. The town 
has been the home of various notable men, but of 
them all "Lord" Timothy Dexter was the most pictur- 
esque. He was born in Maiden in 1 747, and as a young 
man was a prosperous leather-dresser in Charlestown. 
Presently he bought a mansion in Newburyport, 
and after he had moved into it with his wife, son, 
and daughter, he adorned the roof with minarets sur- 



On the Massachusetts Coast 99 

mounted by a profusion of gilt balls, and painted the 
walls with gaudy colors. In front of the house he 
erected rows of columns fifteen feet or more high, and 
on each placed an image carved in' wood. There were 
fully forty of the effigies, and they included Indian 
chiefs, generals, philosophers, politicians, and states- 
men, with now and then a goddess of Fame or Liberty, 
and a number of lions. The persons represented 
had their names painted on their respective pedestals, 
but whenever the owner of this wooden museum 
chanced to take the notion he changed the names and 
had them painted over. One effigy was of Dexter 
himself. It was inscribed, "I am the greatest man 
IN THE EAST." 

A famous commercial exploit of Dexter's was the 
sending of a lot of warming-pans to the West Indies 
in one of his ships. They were about the last articles 
that would be needed in that hot climate, but the 
captain took off the covers, fitted these covers with 
handles and so transformed them into skimmers. 
The pan parts he called ladles, and he sold both 
ladles and skimmers to the sugar manufacturers at 
a great profit. 

Perhaps the oddest thing Dexter ever did was to 
publish a pamphlet entitled "A Pickle for the Knowing 
Ones." As a whole it was a jumble of nonsense, and 
it was entirely without punctuation. He gave away 
thousands of copies. The lack of punctuation was 
criticised, and in a second edition he placed a page 



lOO 



New England 



at the end devoted solely to punctuation marks with 
which the public was requested to "pepper and salt" 
the text to suit themselves. 

Several noteworthy places on the coast south of 
Boston remain to be mentioned. First comes Quincy, 
where a leading spirit among the pioneer settlers was a 
man named Morton. He conducted a profitable trade 
with the Indians, but he and his fellows devoted their 
gains to rioting and drunkenness. They called their 
village Merrymount, and set up a May-pole eighty feet 
high about which they drank and frisked "like so many 
furies." It was learned at Plymouth that they were 
selling muskets to the Indians, and Captain Miles 
Standish came and dispersed the rioters, and Morton 
was sent to England. 

Nearly all the southwestern part of the town is a 
mass of granite rock that rises six hundred feet above 

the level of the 
sea. Here is 
one of the 
oldest quarries 
in the country. 
Quincy was 
the birthplace 
of two presi- 
dents of the 
United States, 

Two houses, in each of which was born a John Adams 
president of the United States and his son, 




On the Massachusetts Coast 



lOI 



John Quincy Adams. The simple farmhouses in which 
they were born are not a stone's throw apart. 

Whien the elder Adams was a boy he had to study 
Latin grammar, and he found it so dull that he went 
to his father and told him he did not like study, and 
wanted some other employment. 

"Well, John," the father said, "then you may try 
ditching." 

He set the boy to work in a meadow back of the house, 
and at first the change seemed delightful. But by 
night John would have 
liked to quit the task. 
Pride, however, made him 
continue at it another 
day. Then he informed 
his father that he could 
bear the abominable ditch- 
ing no longer, and that 
he would go back to the 
Latin grammar. 

The great Fore River 
ship-building works are 
at Quincy. They make 
steam yachts, steel 
schooners, / and various 
vessels large and small 
for naval use. 

Beyond Quincy is Hingham, which has a very in- 
teresting church erected in 1680. This is the oldest 




TIk' Old Ship," an historic 
church at Hingham 



I02 New England 

house of worship in the United States now in use. 
One interesting item in its history is the fact that 
the parish once appointed two men to keep its porch 
from being needlessly encumbered with women on the 
Sabbath. The building, because of its peculiar struc- 
ture, is called "The Old Ship." It has a central 
belfry, which, in addition to holding the bell, served 
as a lookout station. The bell rope dangles down to 
the floor in the centre aisle of the church. 



Minot's Ledge Lighthouse 

Eight miles southeast of the entrance to Boston 
Harbor is the most famous of New England's light- 
houses. It is a mile and a half from land, on Minot's 
Ledge, a position of great peril to incoming vessels 
when a northerly gale is blowing. The rock on which 



On the Massachusetts Coast 103 

it stands is thirty feet broad. Only for a short time at 
low tide does the top of the rock come into view. The 
first lighthouse on the ledge was a dwelling supported at 
a height of fifty-five feet on nine solid iron shafts that 
were ten inches in diameter. This stood only two years. 
In the early spring of 1851, during one of the heaviest 
gales known on the coast, great quantities of ice ad- 
hered to the supports, and it was completely wrecked. 
The keeper and his two assistants lost their lives. 

The present structure is a tapering round tower of 
dovetailed granite blocks that are made still more 
secure by being bound together with heavy wrought- 
iron pins. The stonework extends up eighty-eight 
feet, and is solid for nearly half that height. Above 
the solid portion are the apartments of the keeper, 
consisting of five rooms, separated from each other 
by iron floors. At the very top is the light. Two 
years were required to level the foundation rock, 
working from April i to September 15, and then 
only when the tide served. The first stone was laid 
on July 9, 1857, and just four stones were placed in 
position that season. In 1858 six courses were laid, 
and not until two years later was the structure 
completed. 

As we go on down the coast we come to Greenbush, 
where was born, in 1785, Samuel Woodworth, author 
of "The Old Oaken Bucket." There can be seen his 
boyhood home with its ancient well-sweep. The poem 
was written in 181 7 when he and his family were living 



I04 New England 

in New York. One day he came into the house, poured 
out a glass of water, and drank it eagerly. "The water 
is very refreshing," he said, "but how much more 
refreshing a drink would be from the old oaken bucket 
in my father's well at home." 

"Wouldn't that be a pretty subject for a poem?" 
his wife asked. 

At this suggestion he seized his pen, and, as the 
home of his childhood rose vividly before his fancy, he 
wrote the familiar words. Nothing else he ever wrote 
has survived. 

One of the famous dwellers on the Massachusetts 
coast was the great statesman, Daniel Webster. In his 
later life he lived at Marshfield, and there died and 
was buried in 1852. He had a domain of over two 
thousand acres, which he made one of the best farms 
in the country. He stocked it with blooded cattle, 
herds of sheep, and fine horses. Gay peacocks strutted 
over the lawn, and he had guinea hens, Chinese poultry, 
and other fowls. He embellished the grounds with a 
great variety of trees, many of them grown from seeds 
of his own planting, and there was a flower garden 
covering nearly an acre of ground. The ocean was 
only a mile distant. All the buildings on the place 
associated with Webster burned in 1878, except a little 
study which he sometimes used. 




In the haven at Nantucket 



Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard 

THE town of Nantucket, on the island of the same 
name, is the quaintest place in New England. It 
is comparatively little affected by the changing customs 
and fashions of the mainland, and has an individuality 
and flavor of the past in its life and homes that are 
105 



io6 New England 

all its own. The island lies well out in the sea south of 
Cape Cod. It has a length of fifteen miles, an average 
breadth of four miles, and is for the most part a wind- 
swept moor diversified with lagoons and ponds. No- 
where does it rise to any striking height ; and the trees, 
except in the villages, are few and stunted. 

When the steamer on which you journey to the island 
reaches port, you observe many ancient fish-houses 
on the wharves, and see little fishing-vessels and 
power boats, dories, and pleasure craft on the water 
all around. The town huddles about the harbor on 
land that terraces steeply upward, and on the highest 
terrace there rises, from amid the roofs and chimneys 
and the green foliage of the shade trees, the dominating 
tower of an old white church with a gilt-domed 
cupola. 

Some of the town streets are paved with cobblestones. 
Nearly all of them are both crooked and narrow, and 
there are numerous delightful little byways and footpath 
alleys. The houses are mostly wooden, with sides and 
roofs of shingles. Many of them were built by old 
sea captains and are of generous size, two or three 
stories high. In years gone by, when the house walls 
were painted red, green, or yellow, and the roofs were 
tarred, the town must have been even more picturesque 
than it is now. 

The first settler of Nantucket was a man named Macy, 
who bought the island from the Indians for a small 
sum of money and two beaver hats. He had previously 



Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard 107 

"dwelt in good repute" a score of years in the Massa- 
chusetts town of Sahsburv at the mouth of the Merri- 




©KalkhogCo..N.Y. 

On the shore at Sconset, Nantucket 



mac River. But one day four Quakers stopped at his 
house for shelter in a severe rain storm, and he let 
them remain until the tempest was over. Quakers 
were persecuted at that time in New England, and it 
was against the law to entertain them. As a result 
Mr. Macy was heavily fined, and he resolved to "take 
up his abode among savages where religious zeal had 
not yet discovered a crime in hospitality." With two 
friends and his family, which included five little chil- 



io8 New England 

dren, he went in an open boat across Massachusetts 
Bay, rounded Cape Cod, and at length reached Nan- 
tucket's sheltered harbor. 

He was welcomed by the numerous Indian popula- 
tion of the island, and he built a house. Soon other 
families came, and the settlers taught their faith to 
the savages, who presently all became "Praying In- 
dians." 

The island government was so free from intolerance 
that it attracted the Quakers to seek homes there. 
Their number increased until the majority of the 
inhabitants were of this faith. 

The early dwellers of Nantucket and other places 
on the New England coast used to keep long boats in 
which they could push out from the shore and give 
chase whenever they saw a whale. If they succeeded 
in making a capture, the yield of oil and whalebone 
made it a rich prize. But the whales, which for a 
time were plentiful in the near waters, became in- 
creasingly shy. Ships had to go after them, and longer 
and longer voyages had to be undertaken until vessels 
would fit out to go to the most distant seas, whence 
they would not return for three or four years. 

Nantucket developed into the chief whaling port of 
America, and its whaleships in their voyages visited 
all the waters of the globe. They wandered far from 
the lanes of commerce, and their captains discovered 
no less than thirty of the islands of the Pacific. One 
Nantucket whaleship was lost on the coast of the Fiji 



Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard 109 

Islands, and all the crew, with a single exception, were 
murdered and probably eaten. 

The world's whaling industry long ago began to 
decline, partly because of the decrease in the number 
of whales, partly because of the discovery of petroleum 




The whaler Greyhound 

and its use for lighting purposes, and very few American 
vessels now make voyages after whales. 

In the heyday of its prosperity as a whaling port 
Nantucket had ten thousand inhabitants. The is- 
land's present permanent population is less than three 
thousand. But there is a great inflow of summer vis- 
itors. It claims that it is one of the best of the nation's 
health resorts. To be on Nantucket is like being on 



I lo New England 

a ship anchored in the ocean. It is twenty-four miles 
from the nearest mainland, and the air cannot help 
being pure. 

One custom which still survives in the old port is 
that of the curfew. Each evening the bell in the an- 
cient church tolls its warning for everybody to get off 
the streets, and for all house lights to be put out, and 
for people to go to bed. There is also a "rising bell," 
as it is called, rung at seven o'clock, and a twelve o'clock 
bell at noon. 

Two watchmen used to go on duty at the church 
after the curfew rang. They took hourly turns in 
watching from the tower. If a fire was seen, they ran 
shouting and blowing horns through the streets. 

There were other watchmen who served as a sort of 
night police force. It was a part of their job to keep 
the boys quiet. If they found them in mischief, there 
would be a chase. Each watchman carried a hook. 
It had a handle three feet long, and the hook was 
just right to catch a boy round the neck or slip 
round his leg. If a boy was caught, the watchman 
would give him a few raps with the wooden end of his 
hook and let him go. These watchmen would go 
through the streets at midnight calling out, "Twelve 
o'clock, and all is well!" 

Until a few years ago Nantucket had a town crier. 
He went about the place crying out the news and what- 
ever any one wanted to advertise. This is something 
the way he would run on : " Oh, yes ! oh, yes ! there's 



Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard 1 1 1 

been a fearful flood out West. Mississippi River all 
under water ! Big murder in Chicago ! Awful news 
in the papers to-day ! Steamer will leave at two p.m. 
Here's a sample of Jones's Soap ! Does any one want 
to buy watermelons? Worth ten cents this week !" 

In the whaling days he spent a good deal of time in 
the tower of the old church watching for returning 
vessels. He had keen eyes, and it was said that he 
could see farther than two ordinary men put together. 
When he sighted a whaler coming he would blow a horn 
and hurry to tell the captain's wife, and she would 
give him fifty cents or so. Then she would take a 
spy-glass and go up to the roof. The old houses had 
platforms perched on their peaks enclosed by strong 
railings. These were reached through a trap door, 
and served as lookouts from which to watch the har- 
bor and the incoming and outgoing vessels. 

On one of the sandhills back of the town is an old 
windmill. It was built in 1746 and was used till 1892. 
Now it is taken care of as a relic of the past. The 
tips of the arms come almost to the ground, and 
the mill has two doors so that if the sails happened 
to be whirling across one of them the other could be 
used. 

There is a sharp contrast between the summer live- 
liness and winter quiet of the island. At times, in the 
cold months, the field ice blows into the harbor, and 
the steamer may stop running for several days. Once 
the island was thus cut off for three weeks. On such 



I 12 



New England 




An old Nantucket windmill 



occasions supplies of kerosene and butter and some 
other things perhaps get low, but there is no suffering. 

A large and interesting neighboring island is Marthas 
Vineyard. This, of all the coast resorts, is said to be 
the favorite summering place of school teachers. It 
used to be famous for the knitting of stockings. In the 
years that followed the Revolution the island women 
knitted fifteen thousand pairs annually, and the state- 
ment is made that the people on vessels approaching 
its harbors could hear the click of the knitting needles 
before the town lights hove in sight. 

There were stirring times on the island when we 
were at war with Great Britain, and the British ships- 
of-war were prowling about its shores. One of the 



Nantucket and Marthas Vineyard 1 1 3 

heroes of those days was a Mr. Cousins, who lived 
where Cottage City now is. He would have liked to 
be fighting in the patriot ranks, but his health was 
too dehcate. An enemy war vessel one day dropped 
anchor off shore halfway over to Cape Cod, and Mr. 
Cousins got out his old flint-lock, proceeded to the 
beach, and began to blaze away at the vessel in right 
good earnest. He knew his gun could not possibly 
carry a bullet so far, and he did not in the least disturb 




,(j; KrJk/ioff Co. \. Y. 



Gay Head, Marthas Vineyard 

the enemy, yet all day long he continued loading and 
firing as rapidly as possible. WTien he was asked why 
he was wasting so much good powder, he responded 
that it was to "show his colors." 



14 



New England 



A former island resident, whose home was at the 
little rustic town of West Tisbury, was Captain 
Joshua Slocum, author of "Sailing Alone Around the 
World," one of the most interesting accounts of real 
sea experiences ever written. The voyage which is 

the subject of this 
book was begun in 
1895 at Boston and 
lasted three years. 
It was made in a 
little vessel that the 
captain built him- 
self. The Spray, 
as he called it, was 
thirty-seven feet 
long and fourteen 
feet wide, and the 
cabin was too low 
to stand upright in. 
Much of the time 
the wheel was 
lashed, and the boat 
steered itself. In 
the fall of 1907, 
the captain sailed 
away in the Spray for South America to explore the 
Orinoco River, and he has never been heard of since. 




Captain Slocum on the Spray, the 
boat in which he sailed alone around 
the world 




"The Angel of Hadley" 
The Connecticut Valley in Massachusetts 

THERE are many well-tilled farms on the fertile 
lowlands that border the Massachusetts portion 
of the Connecticut River, but more important than 
these are the industries in the thriving commercial 
towns and cities. 

"5 



I 1 6 New England 

Springfield is the place first settled. William Pyn- 
chon and others came thither from Roxbury in the 
spring of 1636 and established homes after buying 
the land of the savages, to whom it was chiefly valuable 
as a range for hunting and fishing, and the gathering 
of nuts and wild fruits. Mr. Pynchon remained in 
Springfield only a few years, but his son, "The Wor- 
shipful Major John," was long the leading citizen of 
the valley and carried on an extensive trade with both 
the whites and Indians. Sometimes he sent in a single 
ship to England five thousand dollars' worth of otter 
and beaver skins. Other skins that he bought were 
the gray and red fox, the muskrat, the raccoon, the 
marten, mink, wildcat, and moose. Most of them 
were packed in hogsheads. Many of the skins were 
brought down the river from the distant North and 
West. 

Another early notable was Deacon Samuel Chapin, 
and one of the city's finest art treasures is a statue of 
him by St. Gaudens, showing a typical Puritan on his 
way to church with a big Bible under his arm. 

A third Springfield worthy of the period was Miles 
Morgan. He made the journey from the Connecticut 
Valley to Beverly to marry the lady of his choice, 
taking with him a packhorse, an Indian, and two friends. 
After the wedding the horse was loaded with the 
bride's effects, and she, her husband, and the other 
three made their way through the forest on foot to 
Springfield, a distance of one hundred and twenty 



The Connecticut Valley 1 1 7 

miles. Morgan, though unable to read or write, held 
many important positions. 

Like numerous other New England towns, Spring- 
field suffered severely in King Philip's War. In Octo- 
ber, 1675, the Indians burned thirty-two of its houses 
and twenty-five barns, and killed one woman and four 
men. Only fifteen houses were left standing, and 
some of the homeless families and the troops who 
were sent to the town spent the following winter in 
dugouts and in cellars rudely roofed over. 

The Indians retreated after their assault, and the 
pursuing whites accomplished little except to take a 
single squaw prisoner. One of the old accounts says 
she "was ordered to be torn in pieces by dogs, and 
so was dealt withall." 

The first bridge built across the Connecticut on its 
broader course between the Sound and the northern 
boundary of Massachusetts was erected at Springfield 
in 1805 after years of agitation and considerable 
ridicule of the scheme by local wiseheads. "You might 
as well attempt to bridge the Atlantic," one man 
declared. 

The bridge was wooden, but was not roofed over. 
Its roadway ascended and descended with the curve 
of the arches of each span. It was painted red. When 
it was opened there was a procession, a prayer, and a 
sermon, and there was music, ringing of bells, and a 
salute of seventeen guns fired three times. After 
nine years' service it showed signs of weakening and 



ii8 



New England 



was replaced by the big covered "Old Toll Bridge," 
which still stands. Tolls were collected until 1872. 

During the Revolution various munitions of war 
were made in Springfield — at first in shops along Main 




"The Old Toll Bridge" at Springfield 

Street and in some of the barns, but later these public 
works were moved to a ten-acre square on a broad 
hilltop that the town had taken for a training field. 
Here was established a few years later a government 
armory, and in the Civil War the factories, by running 
night and day, attained a daily output of one thousand 
rifles. 

At one spot, just outside the Armory grounds on 
State Street, is what looks like a quaint old gravestone. 



The Connecticut Valley i 1 9 

It is curiously decorated with the sun, moon, and a 
star, and some other objects, and it is inscribed thus : 

Boston Road 

This Stone is Erected 

by Joseph Wait Esq. 

of Brookfield 

For the Benefit 

of Travellers 

JD 1763 

Wait was a merchant, who lost his way in a snow- 
storm and wandered off the road here. He put up the 
stone to save others from a like experience. 

Not far from this stone is a boulder that marks the 
battle place of Shays' Rebellion, January 25, 1787. 
In the unsettled period that followed the Revolution 
there was little money, prices were high for what farm- 
ers had to buy, and low for what they had to sell, and 
imprisonment for debt was a common occurrence. 
Daniel Shays, who had been an officer in the recent 
war, began drilling the disgruntled farmers of the 
valley and presently led a rustic army of eleven hundred 
men to seize the Springfield arsenal. A small but well- 
armed force opposed them when they neared their goal, 
and a shot from a howitzer was sent into their midst, 
killing four of them. The ragged army halted ap- 
palled, then fled in a panic, and the rebellion was com- 
pletely stamped out within a few weeks. 

At Springfield is pubHshed the famous Webster's 



I20 



New England 



Dictionary, and the Springfield Re publican, which many 
authorities consider unrivalled in its daily presentation 
of the news, and the abihty of its editorial comment. 
The city has many buildings that have architectural 
charm, and takes especial pride in the municipal group 

with its tall tower. 
Among the impor- 
tant manufactures 
of the place are 
pistols, railroad 
cars, skates, but- 
tons, and art goods. 
The neighboring 
town of Westfield 
is known as "The 
Whip City." From 
it come ninety per 
cent of all the 
whips made in the 

,, . . ,,, . . , United States. It 

Spnngheld s municipal group .^ ^^^^ ^^^^^^ ,^^^^ 

Pure Food Town," because of a remarkable crusade 
that originated there to stop all traffic in impure 
foodstuffs. The first impulse to act was aroused by 
the effect of a piece of poisonous candy on a child, 
which was observed by the professor of chemistry at 
the Westfield Normal School. 

Another near-by place that has won a title of its own 
is Holyoke, "The Paper City." Its development as 




The Connecticut Valley 



a manufacturing 
place is due to the 
power obtained 
from the sixty-foot 
fall of the river 
there. The first 
dam was completed 
in the autumn of 
1848. On the day 
appointed for clos- 
ing the outlets and 
letting the water 
fill up the channel 
back of the new 
structure, throngs 
gathered on the 
river banks to see 
the show. The 

story of the occasion is told in the following despatches 
sent to Boston to the head officer of the company that 
built the dam : 

" 10 A.M. Gates just closed ; water fiUing behind dam. 

"12 M. Dam leaking badly. 

" 2 P.M. Stones of bulkhead giving way to pressure. 

''3.20 P.M. Your old dam's gone." 

The huge mass of lumber, stone, and earth had been 
torn from its foundations, and a great wave carried it 
down the channel, rolling it over and over and break- 
ing it into fragments. 




The Westfield Rivei 



122 New England 

A second and more scientifically planned structure 
was completed with entire success the next year. It 
furnished what was at that time the greatest water 
power ever known. The water is carried through the 
city in canals on three different levels. It flows first 
into the highest canal, and, after turning the wheels 
of the mills alongside, passes to the next one to be used 
again by a second series of mills. Finally, after serv- 



^^^^^B^ 






'***' " ---.**^ 




i 


tl 



One of the three Holyoke canals with cotton, paper, and 
other mills beside it 



ing in the same way for a third time, it escapes into 
the river channel. Paper mills predominate in Hol- 
yoke, but there are also great cotton, silk, and other 
mills. 



The Connecticut Valley 123 

A few miles farther up the river is the attractive 
town of Northampton. One of its early ministers 
was Solomon Stoddard. The Indians in their forays 
never attempted to harm him, for they thought he 
was "the Englishman's God." 

Once Rev. Mr. Mix of Wethersfield, Connecticut, 
journeyed to Northampton to call on Mr. Stoddard. 
Not long after he arrived he asked to see his host's 
five daughters. They were called, and he conversed 
with them for a few minutes. Then he asked Mary if 
she would marry him, and said he would smoke a pipe 
with her father while she made up her mind. But her 
answer was not ready when the pipe was finished, 
and he returned to Wethersfield. However, he soon 
received the following letter : 

''Rev. Mr. Mix: 

Yes. 

Mary Stoddard.'^ 

Another old-time Northampton story is of a resident 
who was so saving that whenever he went to the 
meadow to work he would stop his clock from running 
so it would last longer. 

Smith College is at Northampton, and within ten 
miles are Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, 
and the State Agricultural College. 

The town is the trading centre for a considerable 
region of hilly farming country that lies westerly. 
In this hill country, at Cummington, the poet Bryant 



124 



New England 



was born in 1794. At the age of sixteen months he 
knew all the letters of the alphabet, and when not 
quite five years old began to attend the district school. 
About the time he was ten he wrote and declaimed a 
rhymed description of the school, and this was printed 




Smith College students on Paradise Pond 



in the county paper. At seventeen he wrote "Thana- 
topsis," one of his best-known poems. It soon found 
its way into school-books, was quoted from pulpits, 
and gave the author a national fame. He studied law, 
and began the practice of it in the little town of 
Plainfield just across a valley from his own home. 

Plainfield has another claim to our interest in the 
fact that Charles Dudley Warner was born there in 



The Connecticut Valley 



125 



1829. His "Being a Boy" is one of the most enter- 
taining descriptions of old-fashioned New England 
farm life ever written. The experiences he wove into 
the book were partly gained at Plainfield and partly 
at Charlemont in the 
Deerfield Valley, where 
he moved when he was 
eight years old. 

East of Northampton, 
across the Connecticut, 
is"01dHadley." When 
the town was a pioneer 
village two fugitive 
regicides. Generals Goffe 
and Whalley, were hid- 
den for years in the 
home of the Hadlc}- 
minister. Once, when 
the town was attacked 
by Indians while the 
people were at church, 
General Goffe saw from his window their skulking 
approach, and hurried to the meeting-house to give 
the alarm. By the time he got there the war-whoop 
sounded and the savages were at hand. The people 
were thrown into great confusion, but the grave gray- 
bearded stranger assumed command with an air of 
authority, and under his direction they routed the 
invaders. Then he vanished, and for a long time 




William Cullen Bryant 



126 



New England 



afterward the people believed that he was an angel 
sent by God for their deliverance. 

"Fighting Joe Hooker," the most notable New Eng- 
land general in the Civil War, was a Hadley boy. 

Another valley town which commonly has "Old" 
before its name is Deerlield. Twice it was practically 
wiped out by the Indians, and the second time many 
of its inhabitants were carried away captive to Canada 
in midwinter. One of these captives was the little 
daughter of the minister. She grew up among the 
Indians and married one of them and steadily refused 




The broad street at Hadley, one mile long and twenty 
rods wide 



to return to live with her Deerfield kindred. A garri- 
son house escaped the torches of the raiders. Its front 



The Connecticut Valley 



127 



door, in which the Indians hacked a hole with their 
tomahawks to shoot through at its inmates, has 
been preserved 
among the 
treasures of 
the remark- 
able museum 
of antiquities 
that the town 
possesses. In 
the southern 
part of Deer- 
field, beside a 
sluggish httlc 
brook, is a 
monument 
where seventy- 
one persons 
slain there by 
the Indians are 
buried in a 




"Fighting Joe Hooker," the most notable 
New England general in the Civil War 



Bloody Brook" ever 



common grave. 

The stream has been called 

since. 

At Turner's Falls occurred another desperate battle 
with the Indians in which both they and the whites 
suffered severely. It was in the spring when the Indi- 
ans were there to fish. They were surprised at day- 
break while asleep, and many of them were driven into 



128 



New England 




^^^ 



the water and were swept to their death over the 
falls. But Indians came from other camps, and the 
retreat of the English was a tragedy. 

A few miles farther up the river is Northfield, or 
Squakheag, as it was originally called. At the out- 
break of King Philip's War it was on the far frontier and 

had been set- 
1 ^^-^^a^ ^i^^ only three 

years. Here 
were seven- 
teen thatched 
cabins , a 
church, a log 
fort, and a 
stockade of 
rough logs 
eight feet high 
pierced with 
loopholes. One day in early September, while some 
of the men were working in the meadows, a band of 
Indians under Sagamore Sam and another chief known 
as "One-Eyed John" assailed the town. They killed 
a number of people in the houses, shot down the work- 
ers who attempted to make their way from the mead- 
ows to the settlement, and burned several of the 
dwellings. But they could not capture the stockaded 
enclosure. A party coming to the aid of the town was 
ambushed, and nearly all of them killed. The heads 
of the slain were stuck up on poles by the wayside. 



An old house that survived the Indian 
attack on Deerfield 



The Connecticut Valley 129 

Soon afterward this town was abandoned, and the 
savages wiped out what remained of it with fire. 
Presently a new settlement began, but shortly after- 
ward suffered the fate of the first. 

A short distance south of the town is Clark's Island, 
which has a curious legend of Captain Kidd. We are 
told that the pirate sailed up to this secluded spot, 
and he and his men brought on shore a heavy iron 
chest full of gold and jewelry and other precious loot. 
They dug a deep hole and lowered the chest into it. 
Then, in what was considered the proper old-fashioned 
pirate way, one of the crew was selected by lot, killed, 
and his body placed on top of the loose earth that had 
been thrown into the hole. His ghost was supposed 
to haunt the vicinity, and to forever guard the riches 
from audacious treasure-seekers. 

From time to time, in the darkness of night when 
the gales howled, persons are said to have seen sailing 
up the stream a phantom ship, manned by a spectral 
crew, and commanded by a black-bearded ghost with 
the familiar features of Captain Kidd. Opposite the 
island the anchor was let go, and Kidd in a boat rowed 
by four sailors went ashore. After satisfying himself 
that the plunder was safe he returned to the ship and 
sailed down the river. 

Some people doubt the whole story and ask how 
Captain Kidd ever navigated his ship up there past 
the rocky falls. 




Greylock, the highest Massachusetts mountain 
Beautiful Berkshire 

BERKSHIRE County sweeps straight across the 
western end of Massachusetts. It is a district of 
mountains and tumbled lesser heights, and, though one 
or two of its valleys are broad enough to give a sense of 
repose, even there the blue waves of the encircling hills 
130 



Beautiful Berkshire 



31 



are constantly in sight. From the uplands the streams 
come coursing down the wooded glens, with here and 
there a foaming waterfall, and they go on through the 
valleys, still swiftly as a rule, but sometimes broaden- 
ing into a pond or lake, and occasionally are set to work 
to turn the wheels of a mill. 

It is one of the most attractive of New England 
resort regions, and portions of the county are famous 
as the summer 



playground of 
millionnaires 
from the great 
cities. In other 
parts farms 
predominate, 
some of them 
thrifty, and 
some of them 
quite other- 
wise. 

Balanced 
Rock is the 




Balanced Rock, which weighs one hundred 

and fifty tons, yet can be easily swayed by 

a man's weight 



county's greatest natural curiosity. 
This is reached by a pleasant drive northeasterly 
from Pittsfield. Its height is eighteen feet, its weight 
about one hundred and fifty tons, and it rests on one 
square foot of surface. Yet it is so evenly balanced 
as to be readily swayed by a man's weight. 

In the northern part of the county is Greylock, 
3500 feet high, the loftiest mountain in the state. 



132 New England 

Some claim that it was named after an Indian chief of 
the vicinity. Others attribute the name to the moun- 
tain's appearance when the hoar-frost of autumn 
creeps downward from the summit, touching each dark 
evergreen with silver gray. 

Near the base of Greylock is the busy manufactur- 
ing city of North Adams, on the outskirts of which is 
the western portal of the Hoosac Tunnel. The Hoosac 
mountain range separates the Connecticut Valley from 
the valley of the Hudson. It is many miles across, 
but at one point the Deerfield River flows at the very 
foot of the central ridge, and then goes on eastward 
to the Connecticut, thirty miles away. On the op- 
posite side of the ridge the Hoosac River flows west- 
ward from the foot of the mountain wall, and the 
valleys of these two streams furnish an easy route for 
a railroad. Before the days of railroads the possibility 
was considered of tunnelling the mountain for a canal 
to furnish a direct avenue of easy grade between the 
West and Boston. 

In 1842 a railroad was completed over the moun- 
tains farther south, but the grades were steep and 
difficult, and two years later work was begun on the 
Hoosac Tunnel. A great drilling machine that weighed 
seventy-five tons was used at first, but it soon broke 
down and was sold for old iron. Then, for a long 
time, the drilling was done by hand. Afterward a 
compressed air drill was invented which made the 
progress much more rapid. The men worked in re- 



Beautiful Berkshire 



33 



lays of eight hours each, and there was no pause, day 
or night. WTien the work was in full swing the pound- 
ing of the drills, the rumbling of the cars carrying away 
the refuse, and the explosions made a noise in the 
narrow passage 
that was terrific. 
The drilling was 
carried on from 
both sides of the 
mountain, and the 
floor of each tun- 
nel was slanted 
slightly upward 
to allow the 
water which came 
down constantly 
through the roof 
to flow away. A 
large amount of 
water still seeps 
into the tunnel, 

and the discharge at the west end is six hundred 
gallons a minute. 

That the work might proceed more rapidly, a shaft 
was sunk from a hollow on the height to the level of 
the tunnel, a distance of over one thousand feet, and 
thence the excavating was pushed in both directions. 
So accurate were the engineers that the several passages 
joined with only a few inches discrepancy. 




A dweller on the heights 



134 New England 

The first train passed through the tunnel in February, 
1875, but much still needed to be done. There was 
great danger from falling rocks, and to make the roof 
secure the tunnel was arched with brick. It is four 
and three-quarters miles long, twenty-four feet wide, 
and twenty feet high, and is equipped with a double 
track. The original estimate of the cost was two 
million dollars, yet the actual cost was over fourteen 
million. 

At the time the tunnel was begun it was the biggest 
undertaking of the kind that had ever been attempted. 
There were many accidents, and in all one hundred 
and ninety -five lives were lost. The most serious 
accident was in the central shaft. The buildings at 
the top caught on fire, and thirteen men down below 
perished, suffocated by the smoke of falling timbers. 

About ten miles west from the tunnel is Williams- 
town and its famous college. The chief street in the 
place is probably unexcelled in America in its rural 
beauty. It is impressively broad, there are noble 
trees and velvet lawn, and on either side are college 
buildings, some modern that have great architectural 
grace, and some with the simple charm of age, while 
roundabout are the serene blue mountain ranges. 

The boundary lines of Massachusetts, Vermont, and 
New York meet rather romantically in what is called 
Moon Hollow. 

As we go southerly down the county we come to the 
little town of Cheshire, which once produced two 



Beautiful Berkshire 135 

hundred thousand pounds of cheese annually. It was 
there that "The Great Cheshire Cheese" was made 
and sent by the citizens of the place as a token of their 
admiration to Thomas Jefferson, then President of the 
United States. The cheese was one day's product of 
the town's dairies. Its weight was 1235 pounds, and 
it was molded in a cider press. Oxen drew it to Hud- 
son, New York, whence the rest of its journey was 




The Housit \aliL-\- at Williamstovvn 



by water. Mr. Jefferson sent back a good-sized piece 
to the inhabitants to satisfy them of its excellence. 

The neighboring town of Lanesboro was the birth- 
place of one of the best known of American humorists, 
"Josh Billings," as he called himself. His real name 



136 



New England 



was Henry W. Shaw. After he became an author he 

let his hair grow long and cultivated oddity in his 

appearance. He always spent his summers in Lanes- 

boro, and enjoyed sitting 

around cracking jokes and 

^^m^^ talking to congenial friends 

'^l^ W and acquaintances. Both 

fame and fortune came to 

him through his writing and 

lecturing, and his whimsical 

wisdom and fantastic spelling 

will long be remembered. 

Here is an example of his 
writing, which is part of a 
letter describing a sojourn in 
the small Berkshire town of 
New Ashford : 

"Right in front ov the 
little tavern, whare i am 
staying, rizes up a chunk ov 
land, that will make yu feel 
weak tew look at it. 

"I hav bin on its top, and 

far above waz the brite blue 

ski, while belo me the rain 

shot slanting on the valley, and the litening played 

its mad pranks. 

"But what a still place this New Ashford iz. 

"At sunrize the roosters crow all around, once 




"Josh Billings, " one of the 

best-known of American 

humorists 



Beautiful Berkshire 137 

apeice ; at sunset the cows cum hollering home tew be 
milked; and at twilite out steal the krickets, with a 
song, the burden ov which seems sad and weary. 

"This iz all the racket thare iz in New Ashford. It 
iz so still here that yu can hear a feather drop from a 
bluejay's tail. 

"Out ov the mountain leaks a httle brook, and up 
and down this brook each day i loiter. 

"In mi hand i hav a short pole, on the end ov the 
pole a short line, on the line a sharp hook, looped on the 
hook a grub or a worm. 

"Every now and then thare cums dancing out ov 
this little brook a live trout no longer than yure finger, 
but az sweet az a stick ov kandy, and in he goes at the 
top ov mi baskit. 

"This iz what i am here for; trout for breakfast, 
trout for dinner, and trout for supper. 

"I hav not a kare on mi mind, not an ake in mi 
boddy. 

"I havn't read a nuzepaper for a week, and wouldn't 
read one for a dollar. 

"I shall stay here till mi munny givs out, and shall 
cum bak tew the senseless crash ov the city, with a 
tear in mi eye, and holes in both ov mi boots. 

"The fust thing i do in the morning, when i git up, 
iz tew go out and look at the mountain, and see if it 
iz thare. If this mountain should go away, how 
lonesum i should be ! 

" It is now 9 oclk, p.m., and every thing in New 



138 New England 

Ashford iz fast asleep, inkluding the krickets. I will 
just step out and see if the mountain iz thare, and then 
i will go tew bed too. 

''Oh! the bliss ov living up in New Ashford, cluss 
bi the side ov a grate giant mountain tew guard yu, 
whare every thing iz az still az a boys tin whissell at 
midnite, whare board iz only 4 dollars a week, and 
everyboddy, kats and all, at 9 oclk p.m., are fast asleep 
and snoring." 

The largest place in Berkshire is Pittsfield. Its 
first settler rode over the hills from the east, with his 
wife on a pillion. Another early comer lay for three 
days in a hollow log with savages about. The first 
settler to arrive with a cart had to hew a way for it 
through the woodland. At night, for fear of wild 
beasts, he tied his horses to a tree and stood guard, 
munching apples to keep awake. The wolves lurked 
about the new hamlet, and often drove the sheep close 
up to the houses. Sometimes a housewife would 
shoot one of them. 

At the time that Burgoyne made his invasion from 
Canada, Pittsfield had for its minister "Fighting Par- 
son Allen." He went with the Berkshire troops to 
Bennington as chaplain, and when the battle began 
mounted a stump and exhorted the enemy to lay 
down their arms. He received only the spiteful re- 
sponse of musketry, and he left the stump, seized a 
gun, and did valiant duty with the rest of the troops. 

Not far from Pittsfield is beautiful Lake Onata. 



Beautiful Berkshire 



39 



Once a dweller on its shore, while out with his dog, 
hunting, saw a fine white deer stooping to drink at the 
margin of the lake. He raised his gun to fire, but, 
before he could pull the trigger, his dog howled, and 
the deer faded away. There is a Mohegan legend of 
such a deer that came each spring with the opening 
of the cherry blossoms to drink from this lake. It 
was the Indian behef that, so long as the snow-white 
doe came there to drink, their harvest would not fail 
them, or pestilence destroy them, or fires lay waste 




Pontoosuc Lake near Pittsfield 



their country. They never molested the creature. 
However, at last, a Frenchman from Canada, who visited 



140 



New England 



them, induced a warrior, by a gift of fire-water, to 
kill the gentle deer. He set out for Montreal with 
the skin, but was slain on the journey. Never after 

that did things 
go well with 
the Indians. 

The town of 
Stockbridge 
was originally 
laid out for 
their accom- 
modation, and 
in 1737 a 
church and 
schoolhouse 
were built for 
them there. 
The settlement 
gradually in- 
creased in size 
until the In- 
dians num- 
bered nearly 
five hundred. They were Christianized by John 
Sargent, who came into the wilderness of southern 
Berkshire at the age of twenty-four, mastered their 
language, and preached three or four sermons a week 
to them. In 1751 Jonathan Edwards settled in Stock- 
bridge to assist in the task of converting the red 





^ 


■■4 






"■'"^ 


■% 





A Berkshire waterfall 



Beautiful Berkshire 141 

heathen. His grandson, the notorious Aaron Burr, 
spent a part of his boyhood in the town. The 
Indians all migrated to western New York shortly 
after the Revolution. 

Cyrus Dudley Field, who laid the first telegraph 
cable across the Atlantic, was born in Stockbridge. 
His father was the minister. Cyrus had three brothers 
and all four boys were mischievous. It is said that their 
father would take two of them into the pulpit with 
him, while the other two sat in a pew with their mother. 
During the "long prayer" the minister would pray 
with a hand on the head of each of his charges "to be 
sure they were there." 

Stockbridge and Lenox are both famous summer 
resort towns. The creation of beautiful estates at the 
latter place began about 1850, and now there is not 
a hilltop nor a valley but has its splendid houses and 
far-flung attendant gardens, and each mansion com- 
mands some natural mountain vista of great beauty. 

At one time the vicinity was such a resort of notable 
writers, who had either permanent or summer houses 
there, or came thither as visitors, that it was called "a 
jungle of literary lions." Among the rest was Haw- 
thorne, who came in the spring of 1850 to dwell with 
his family in a little red house in Stockbridge, just over 
the line from Lenox. Down below, in the valley, was 
a beautiful lake, and roundabout were hills and moun- 
tains. "WTiile there he wrote "The Wonder Book," 
which boys and girls have read with delight ever since. 



142 



New England 



Each day he went with his children, Una and Julian, 
to a farmhouse half a mile distant for milk along a 
road that he called "The Milky Way" ; and he used to 

play with them 
flying kites, 
went nutting 
and climbing 
trees, made 
boats for them 
to sail on the 
lake, took 
them fishing 
and flower- 
gathering, and 
tried to teach 
them to swim. 
In winter he 
was their com- 
|) anion in 
coasting, and 
in building a 
palace of snow 
with ice win- 
The old white church in Luk.x dows. Yet he 

was so shy 
with strangers that he would jump a fence to avoid 
meeting them on the highway. 





The Merrimack above Pawtucket Falls 
Bay State Industries, Places, and Famous People 

MARKET gardening is done on a large scale near 
the cities. Many of the market gardeners have 
big glass houses that are heated in winter so that crops 
are growing in them all through the year. In the 
adjacent fields several crops are raised each season. 
143 



144 



New England 



As soon as one crop is marketed the ground is 
ploughed, manured, and harrowed, and another crop 
started. Planting, cultivating, weeding, watering, and 

gathering these mar- 
ket garden crops give 
employment to many 
hands. 

Onions, tobacco, 
hay, and fruit are 
important crops in 
some sections, and 
milk has to be pro- 
duced in large quan- 
tities to supply the 
city dwellers. Bos- 
ton requires so much 
milk that a great 
deal is brought to it 
by train from long 
distances. 

The big city of the 
central part of the state is Worcester. It was much 
harassed by the Indians in its early days, and for a 
long time it was so pestered by wolves that the people 
were deterred from raising sheep. The occupations 
of the inhabitants were chiefly agricultural. Now the 
place is a great manufacturing city, especially noted 
for the making of nails, screws, needles, wire, different 
kinds of tools, envelopes, and boots and shoes. The 




The City Hall, Worcester 



Bay State Industries and People 145 

most extensive wire mill in the world is in Worcester. 
Here, too, is the richly endowed Clark University. 

A favorite pleasure resort of the people is the lake 
on its borders, which bears the resounding Indian name 
of Quinsigamond. This name is a combination of 
words which mean "the fishing-place for long-noses" 
— that is, for pickerel. 

At Spencer, a few miles west of Worcester, was 
born in 1819 the inventor, Elias Howe. After he left 
the home farm in early manhood he worked in machine 
shops in Lowell and Boston. A chance remark about 
a machine to do sewing set him to thinking. After 
many years of experimenting, poverty, and discour- 




A lake in a Worcester park 



agement he evolved the sewing machine, which he 
patented in 1846. At first he had uphill work to 
prove that it was practical, and that he was its real 



146 



New England 



■** 



inventor. But at last he reaped the financial success 
which was his due, and for a time had an annual in- 
come of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. In the 
Civil War he served as a common soldier, and on one 
occasion, when the pay of the regiment was delayed, 
he advanced the money himself. 

Another famous Worcester County inventor was Eli 
Whitney, who was born at Westboro in 1765. He 

contrived the 
wonderfully 
simple cotton 
gin which sepa- 
rates the cotton 
fibre from the 
clinging seeds. 
But he gained 
no profit 
through his in- 
vention, for it 
was stolen and 
involved him in expensive lawsuits. Later he gave 
much attention to the improvement of firearms, a 
factory was established near New Haven, and his in- 
genuity and business ability brought him a fortune. 

The town in this part of the state which had the 
severest experience in the Indian wars was Lancaster. 
A night attack in February, 1676, nearly wiped out the 
settlement ; many persons were killed, and others were 
carried off captive. One of the captives was Mrs. 




Mount Wachusett 



Bay State Industries and People 147 

Rowlandson, the minister's wife. She accompanied 
the Indians in all their wanderings, and was made the 
slave of a chief named Quinnapin. Often they were 
destitute of food, and were driven to boil the hoofs 
of dead horses, or to procure marrow from old bones, 
and eked out this fare with groundnuts and the tender 
buds of trees. If a deer or a bear was killed, they had 
a ravenous feast. After a few months Mrs. Rowland- 
son was ransomed. 
The negotiating w^as 
done at Redemption 
Rock near Wachusett 
Pond in the town of 
Princeton. 

Massachusetts was 
the leading colony for 
mining and manufac- 
turing iron for a hun- 
dred years. At first 
the iron was obtained 

largely from rusty deposits in swamps. The farmers 
would combine to establish rude forges where the ore 
was melted with charcoal iires and cast into such 
articles as kettles and cannon, or hammered into bar 
iron. Later, richer ores were opened up, and pig iron 
good enough to be used for edged tools was produced 
in furnaces. The iron for the famous Monitor, which 
played so important a part in the Civil War, came 
from near Mount Grey lock. 




Lancasler's "Great Kim,"" which al- 
tained a girth of twenty-five feet 



148 New England 

Most of the New England mines closed long ago 
because they could not compete with those in Pennsyl- 
vania and the West. Nevertheless, iron and steel 
manufactures that require little metal, but much 
skilled labor and exact machinery, still flourish in New 
England. For instance, over half the tacks of the 
nation are made in or near Taunton. 

At the edge of the water beside the Taunton River 
in Berkley is the famous "Dighton Writing Rock," 
with its curious, but rather indefinite inscriptions. 
The flat, sculptured face of this granite rock rises about 
five feet above the ground and is eleven feet long. 
The designs were on the rock when the first settlers 
found it. Some have thought they were chiselled by 
the order of one of the old pirate captains to mark the 
site of buried treasure, and the shore roundabout for 
a considerable distance has been all dug over in a 
vain search for the hidden riches. Others think the 
stone was marked by a prehistoric navigator from 
Europe. More likely it com.memorates some event 
in Indian experience. 

There are about four hundred cotton mills in New 
England. They make such things as sheets, towels, 
stockings, underwear, thread, string, handkerchiefs, and 
gingham and calico dress-goods. Over a thousand 
persons may be employed in a single mill. 

The cotton is brought in bales from the Southern 
States where it is raised. Each bale weighs about 
five hundred pounds. After the dirt and small sticks 



Bay State Industries and People 149 

have been removed, the fibres are combed out straight, 
and pressed into thin gauze-Uke sheets. These are 
gradually drawn out and twisted into threads, and 
then the threads are woven into cloth by the looms. 

At Fall River is the greatest group of cotton mills 
in the United States. The Quequechan River, which 
flows through the city, has a fall of one hundred and 
thirty feet in a half mile, and the great mills crowd 
thickly along it. More than two miles of cotton cloth 
a minute are woven in these every working day, or 
enough in a year to very nearly reach to the moon and 
back. 

The neighboring city of New Bedford is also famous 
for the number and size of its cotton mills. This 
was formerly a great whaling centre. More than 
three hundred whaling vessels sailed from it in a year 
just before the Civil War. 

The section of country around Fall River, and the 
valley of the Merrimack are the two most important 
centres of cotton manufacture in America. Lowell is 
called "The Spindle City" because of the great number 
of spindles in its big cotton mills. The Pawtucket Falls 
furnish power. No one can tell for how many successive 
years the Indians had resorted to the falls for salmon, 
shad, and sturgeon before the apostle, Eliot, came 
thither "to spread the net of the Gospel to fish for 
their souls." Every spring he preached to them on 
Massic Island, where one of the mills now stands. 

In the rude early days, when the first Lowell cotton 



150 New England' 

mill was built in 1813, the sun aided in bleaching the 
cloth. Large areas of it were pinned to the grass, and 
the overseer's wife sprinkled them regularly with her 
watering-pot. 

For several decades the workers in the spinning- 
room were Yankee girls from the farms. One of them 
was the poet, Lucy Larcom, and in intervals between 
tending the shuttles she committed verses to memory 
from slips of paper pasted on the walls. Later the 
looms were watched by Irish lasses, and then by 
French Canadian girls. Now most of the employees 
are emigrants from continental Europe. 

Down the river is Lawrence, another big mill city, 
and a few miles farther on is Haverhill. The latter 
place suffered severely at the hands of the Indians in 
a raid March 15, 1697. They carried off several 
captives, one of whom was Mrs. Hannah Dustin, who, 
with a woman companion, was taken up the river to 
an island six miles above Concord, New Hampshire. 
Here was the home of the Indian whose prisoners they 
were. The Indian family consisted of two men, three 
women, and seven children ; and there was one other 
captive, a boy who had been carried away from 
Worcester, the previous year. 

On the last night of the month Mrs. Dustin, the 
other woman, and the boy armed themselves with 
tomahawks, and killed ten of the twelve Indians. A 
lad for whom they had a fancy was spared purposely, 
and one of the squaws whom they had left for dead 



Bay State Industries and People i 5 1 

jumped up and ran with him into the woods. The 
three whites took what provisions there were in the 
wigwam of their master, and put them and a gun and 
a tomahawk into a canoe. They destroyed the other 
canoes and embarked. But they had not gone far 
when Mrs. Dustin decided to return and secure the 
scalps of the Indians to show their neighbors at home 
lest their story should not be credited. So back they 
went, got the scalps, and carried them to the canoe 




The dam at Lawrence 



in a bag. Then they proceeded on their journey, and 
did not pause even at night, for while two of them 
slept the other managed the boat, and they reached 
home without mishap. 






152 New England 

At Haverhill Whittier was born in 1807 '^^ ^ simple 

Quaker farmhouse, and the dwelling remains to-day 

much as he described it in his poem, "Snowbound.'^ 

Fully half the nation's boots and shoes are made in 

Massachusetts. Lynn is the leading city for this 

industry. The old- 
time shoemaker used 
to travel with his kit 
from house to house, 
and would stay in each 
n house long enough to 
^^^^ f-^^^^k make shoes for the 

^^^^K kl^^^H ^^^^^^ family. He sat 

^^^HL ■ ^Cp-n-^.vmia QYi a low bench and 

^^^^HlL. ^'"'^'l^^Bhi^* V ^^^' sewed, and ham- 

^^^^^^B ^^^^^^m rnered with much the 

^^^^^V ^Sm^mmf same simple tools as 

^^^V i^/ had been used for the 

^^ JHp /' purpose in Europe a 

thousand years before. 

To-day steel fingers 

have taken the place of the shoemaker's hands, and 

there are machines which will sew six hundred shoes 

daily, and some that put pegs into the soles at the 

rate of nine hundred a minute. About one hundred 

and fifty New England towns have shoe factories in 

them, and many large firms make special shoes which 

they spend much money in advertising. 

The first American watch factory was estabUshed 



John G. Whittier 



Bay State Industries and People 153 

at Shrewsbury, near Worcester, about 1790, and since 
then the industry has developed into one of great 
importance in southern New England. The simplest 
of the watches have only fifty-four parts, and the 
finer ones nearly two hundred. Watches first became 
practical about the year 1500 when a German invented 
the mainspring, and an Englishman the hairspring and 
balance wheel. Waltham, not far from Boston, is 




An old-time shoemaker 



famous for its watches all over the civilized world. 
The business began there in 1854 with the employment 
of ninety people, whose output was five watches a day. 
Now four thousand persons are employed, and produce 
daily three thousand watches. Some of the screws are 



154 New England 

so small that a lady's thimble will contain twelve 
thousand of them. 

Between Waltham and Boston is Cambridge, where 
is located the oldest of our country's colleges. It was 




The Harvard Gate 

established only six years after Boston was settled. 
Two years later a young clergyman, John Harvard, 
died, and left his books and half his estate to the col- 
lege. Forthwith it was called by his name. 

One wooden building was all the college had at first. 
In this was a bare hall furnished with plain substantial 
tables, a small room containing John Harvard's books, 
and a few chambers and studies. Even this building 
was thought by some people to be "too gorgeous for a 
wilderness." The first class to graduate numbered 



Bay State Industries and People 155 

nine. Many gifts were received to aid the college, 
some of money, some of books, some of silver or pewter 
articles. Live sheep were sent for the students' food, 
and homespun cloth for their clothing. One gift was 
a printing press, which was sent across the ocean from 
Amsterdam in 1639, and was the first in America. 
The earliest book to be printed on it was the "Bay 
Psalm Book." The few copies of this which have 
survived are so precious that collectors are glad to pay 
its weight in gold for one. 

The university now has nearly one thousand in- 
structors and about six thousand students, and a 
library that numbers over one million volumes. In a 
prominent place on the grounds is a statue of John 
Harvard seated in a chair on a broad pedestal of stone. 
Many pranks have been played by the students with 
this statue, a favorite one being to crown the figure 
with a pan. 

It was at Cambridge on the third of July, 1775, that 
Washington, after an eleven days' journey on horse- 
back from Philadelphia, took command of the Ameri- 
can army. He was then forty-three years old. The 
troops were drawn up on parade, and a multitude 
of men, women, and children assembled to look on, 
many of whom came a long distance in all sorts and 
conditions of vehicles. At nine o'clock in the morning 
Washington and his officers mounted their horses and 
rode to the common. The day was warm, and they 
sought shelter in the shade of a near-by elm, where he 



156 New England 

wheeled his horse and drew his sword as commander- 
in-chief of the forces of the United Colonies. The 
tree still stands, though much decayed and shattered. 
Washington had his headquarters at Cambridge in 
a large, dignified mansion, which later became the 
home of the poet Longfellow. A neighboring colonial 




Longfellow's house, Camljridge, which during the 
siege of Boston was Washington's headquarters 

dwelling not far away was the birthplace and lifelong 
home of James Russell Lowell. 

One other Cambridge-born notable was Richard 
Henry Dana, who, when a youth of nineteen, in 1834, 
undertook a voyage to the Pacific as a common sailor, 
a record of which is given in his sea classic, "Two 
Years Before the Mast." In later life he became an 
eminent lawyer. 

A long-time resident of the adjacent town of Arling- 



Bay State Industries and People 157 

ton was J. T. Trowbridge, one of the most popular and 
wholesome of authors of boys' books. 

Farther on is Lexington, famous in connection with 
Paul Revere's ride and the beginning of the Revolution. 




One of the Lexington stone walls, such as served to shelter 
the farmers firing at the retreating British 

The little green where the first blood was shed at dawn 
of April 19, 1775, continues unaltered in size, and 
from it can be seen several dwellings that were there in 
colonial days. One of these dwellings is the Harring- 
ton house, to the front door of which Jonathan Har- 
rington, sorely wounded, dragged himself after the 
fight, and died on the threshold in the arms of his 
wife. 

At Concord, a few miles beyond, provisions and 
munitions of war were stored in every farmer's barn, 
the town house, the tavern shed, and the miller's loft. 
But, before the British arrived, there was time to 



158 



New England 



secrete most of the military stores. In the middle of 
the morning occurred the fight at the North Bridge, 
and the British retreat began. The redcoats were 
fired on from the shelter of buildings, trees, and stone 
walls, all along the way until evening, when they 
reached Charlestown and were protected by the 
guns of their fleet. 

In its associations with great writers Concord is the 
most famous town in the United States. Not far from 
the historic North Bridge is "The Old Manse," which. 




The Concord bridge, where the battle began 



at the time of the Revolution, was the dwelling of Ralph 
Waldo Emerson's grandfather, the Concord minister. 
Emerson himself became a resident of Concord's 



Bay State Industries and People 159 

Old Manse in 1835, at the age of thirty- two. He be- 
lieved in high thinking and simple living, and he 
made some attempts to work on his own land. But 
his infant son stopped him by saying, "Papa, I am 
afraid you will dig your leg," and he surrendered his 
hoe and spade to hands more skilled. 

He was not too serious to play, and would sometimes 
go skating on the river with Hawthorne and Thoreau. 
Hawthorne, wrapped in his cloak, moved like a Greek 
statue, Emerson leaned forward as if weary, while 
Thoreau, who was expert on skates, danced and cut 
strange figures. 

After dwelling two years in the Manse, Emerson 
moved to a cheerful stately house on the opposite 
outskirts of the village, and that continued to be his 
home for the rest of his life. 

Hawthorne came with his bride to make his home 
in the Old Manse in 1843. Besides writing, he raised 
vegetables, and, in domestic emergencies, washed dishes 
and cooked. After a sojourn of three years he moved 
away, but at length returned, and bought and re- 
modelled a house which he called "The Wayside." 

His next neighbor to the south was Ephraim Bull, 
the originator of the Concord Grape. Mr. Bull had a 
passion for grape-raising, but none of the varieties he 
could obtain were hardy enough to be relied on for a 
crop. Wild grapes abounded in the vicinity, and by 
planting selected seeds of these he at length developed 
the original Concord vine. 



i6o 



New England 



Hawthorne's nearest neighbor to the north was 
Bronson Alcott, who called his dwelling "Orchard 
House." There his daughter Louisa wrote several of 
her famous books for children. 

Henry D. Thoreau, the noted nature writer, was born 
at Concord in 1 817. It was his custom to spend a 
portion of each day in the fields or woods or on the 
Concord River. He knew the 
country like a fox or a bird. 
Under his arm he carried an old 
music book in which to press 
plants, and his pockets con- 
tained his diary, a spy-glass, 
microscope, jackknife, and twine. 
If he saw in a tree a hawk's or a 
squirrel's nest which attracted 
him, he climbed up to investi- 
gate, and he often waded into 
pools after water plants. 
Once, in order to prove that a person could provide 
himself with food and other necessaries and live com- 
fortably, and yet have plenty of time for enjoyment, 
he put up a cabin in the Concord woods beside Walden 
Pond, and there dwelt for two years. 

The spot where the cabin stood is marked by a 
cairn of stones to which every lover of Thoreau's 
genius who goes thither adds a stone from the shore 
of a near cove. 




Henry D. Thoreau, 

the famous nature 

writer 




Dutch Point, Hartford, where Fort Hope stood 
Connecticut Beginnings 

THE fertile Connecticut valley did not long escape 
the notice of the settlers on the New England 
coast, and in the autumn of 163.3 Plymouth sent a 
little vessel under the command of William Holmes 
to the river. In the hold of the vessel was the frame 
M 161 



l62 



New England 



of a small trading-house and boards to cover and 
finish it. When the vessel had sailed up the stream as 
far as Hartford the crew were surprised to find that the 
Dutch had built a rude earthwork there and equipped 
it with two cannon. As they approached this port 
the drumbeats resounded from it, and the cannoneers 
stood with lighted matches beside the two guns under 

the banner of 
the Nether- 
lands. 

The Dutch 
threateningly 
demanded that 
Holmes should 
stop or the 
gunners would 
fire. But they 
did not fire, in 
spite of his re- 
fusal to com- 
ply. He went 
on up to Wind- 
sor and there erected the trading-house. A garri- 
son was left in it, and the vessel returned to 
Plymouth. 

By 1635 settlements had been started at both 
Windsor and Wethersfield, and late that year one 
party of sixty men, women, and children from the 
vicinity of Boston marched overland by compass, 




The Wethersfield elm, twenty-seven feet in 
circumference, the biggest in New England 



Connecticut Beginnings 163 

driving their cattle and swine before them. They 
were overtaken by winter while still on the way. 
When they arrived at the river they built rafts and 
crossed to where Hartford now is, but were obliged to 
leave some of their cattle to subsist without hay on 
the east side. Navigation on the stream was com- 
pletely blocked by ice before the middle of November, 
and the vessels which were to have brought the set- 
tlers' household goods and provisions were abandoned 
or sailed back. 

About this time Lieutenant Lion Gardiner with 
thirty men took possession of the river's mouth. They 
tore down the Dutch arms which they found there 
fastened to a tree, and named the spot " Point 
Saybrook." Then they built a wooden fort and some 
houses, and set up a palisade twelve feet high across 
the neck of the peninsula. Gardiner's young wife 
came from Boston to dwell in one of the houses amid 
the drifting snow before the palisade was completed. 

Meanwhile the condition of the pioneers at the set- 
tlements up the river was so forlorn that many of them 
were ready to abandon their new homes and return 
to Massachusetts Bay. In December a party of 
seventy straggled down the river, and twenty miles 
above its mouth found a ^ip frozen in the ice. They 
went on board, and soon afterward a warm rain set 
the ship free. Sails were hoisted, and they went as 
far as Saybrook, where the vessel stuck on the bar and 
had to be unladen. The unlucky colonists found a 



164 New England 

refuge in Lion Gardiner's fort until the ship was afloat. 
Then away they went to Boston. 

The few who remained at the up-river settlements 
lived on scanty supphes of corn obtained from the 
Indians, and on such game as they could shoot, and 
on groundnuts and acorns dug from under the snow. 
Spring found them exhausted, and their unsheltered 
cattle dead, but many more people, cattle, and sup- 
plies arrived in the summer. 

Hartford's first houses were built along a swift- 
flowing "riveret," at the mouth of which was the 
Dutch post. Fort Hope. All the town buildings were 
small. The meeting-house had only plain hard benches 
for seats, and this house of worship and its successors 
were none of them equipped with stoves until about 
181 5. From the very first, however, the meeting-house 
had a bell. There was probably no other public or 
church bell in the colonies then except one at James- 
town, Virginia. 

The Dutch fort soon had English homes all around 
it within a short distance. The garrison erected some 
farm buildings, cultivated a little land, and set out 
cherry trees which presently produced an abundance 
of fruit. There was always friction between the gar- 
rison and the English. Some of the latter began to 
plough up land near the fort, and, when the Dutch 
interfered, cudgelled them. In the night-time they 
seized ground that had been made ready for seed 
and sowed it with wheat. Standing peas were cut down 



Connecticut Beginnings 165 

and corn planted instead. They shut off the fort on 
the landward side with palisades, and they sold a hog 
which belonged to the Dutch because, as they said, 
it had been trespassing on their crops. The Dutch 
were accused of insolence, of supplying guns and 
ammunition to unfriendly Indians, buying goods stolen 
from the English, and harboring fugitives from justice. 
Yet not until 1654, when war was being waged between 
England and Holland, were the Dutch expelled. 

Trouble with the Indians developed early. A trad- 
ing vessel came a little way up the Connecticut in the 
summer of 1634, and moored close to the bank. It 
had a crew of eight men, and two captains named 
Stone and Norton. A party of Pequots visited the 
vessel, and two of them were engaged to pilot two of 
the sailors in a skiff to the Dutch fort at Hartford. 
The four departed up the river. At nightfall they 
landed, and the sailors presently lay down and fell 
asleep. Then their guides killed them. 

The Indians who visited the vessel were entertained 
in a friendly way for several hours ; but by and by the 
crew went on shore, and the savages slew them and 
Captain Stone. The other captain defended himself 
with his musket in the cook-room. That he might 
load and fire faster he emptied a supply of powder into 
a dish close at hand. Unfortunately the powder caught 
fire, and there was an explosion which so burned and 
blinded the captain that the enemy had little diiBculty 
in kilUng him. 



1 66 New England 

This slaughter and other depredations led to an 
English foray against the Pequots in the autumn of 



Saybrook Point Light where the Connecticut River joins 
Long Island Sound 

1636, and then the Indians went on the warpath. 
The fort at Saybrook was first attacked. They 
pestered it like wasps, and Gardiner ordered that no 
one should venture out to fish or to hunt the plentiful 
ducks, geese, and turkeys. Three foolhardy men dis- 
obeyed orders and went a-fowling. When they were 
returning loaded with game the Indians captured two 
of them. The other ran to their boat and rowed to 
the fort. 

Gardiner had three acres of ripening corn two miles 
from the fort. He placed five lusty men with long 
guns to guard it, and they saved most of the crop. 



Connecticut Beginnings 167 

Sometimes the cows returned from pasture with 
arrows sticking in their sides. All the buildings out- 
side of the palisade were destroyed, and the fort was 
beleaguered through the winter. In April Captain 
Underhill arrived with twenty well-armed men from 
Boston. 

That same month the Pequots attacked Wethers- 
field, killed nine of the English, and took two maidens 
captive. The garrison at Saybrook espied the In- 
dians afterward coming down the river in three 
canoes with fragments of their victims' clothes tied to 
long sticks fluttering Hke flags. Lion Gardiner fired 
the fort's "great gun" at them, but they were not 
hit, and they hastily drew their canoes over a narrow 
beach and escaped before he could fire again. 

The colony was now fully aroused. Probably it did 
not number more than eight hundred souls, yet ninety 
men were summoned to go against the foe. They were 
placed under the command of Captain John Mason, and, 
on May loth, they and seventy friendly Mohegans 
embarked at Hartford in a pink, a pinnace, and a 
shallop to sail down the river. 

After several delays caused by running aground the 
Indians insisted on being set ashore to make their 
way to the mouth of the river on foot. They arrived 
at Saybrook some time before the vessels came and 
were eager to go at once in search of Pequots lurking 
in 'the neighborhood. But it was "the Lord's Day," 
and they were held back until Monday dawned. Then 



1 68 New England 

they sallied forth, and presently returned, bringing 
five gory Pequot heads and one wretched prisoner 
whom they killed that night and ate while they danced 
and sang round a large fire they had kindled. 

The Pequots had two strongholds near the mouth 
of the Thames River on its east side. Before pro- 
ceeding against them twenty of Mason's men were 
sent back to guard the settlements up the river. The 
rest and the Boston men sailed eastward, but did not 
stop at the Thames River. Instead, they kept on as far 
as Narragansett Bay with the hope that by landing there 
and marching back they could surprise the Indians. 

The Narragansetts had a village in the vicinity. 
They were enemies of the Pequots, and the English 
obtained from them permission to pass through their 
country, and the help of two hundred of their warriors. 
Thirteen men were left with the vessels which they 
were ordered to take to the mouth of the Thames. 
The others pushed forward with their Indian allies, 
and toward evening of the second day came to a field 
newly planted with corn. There they stopped for a 
while, and then made a cautious hour's march by 
moonlight and camped. The men slept with their 
guns beside them. Their sentries, who were posted 
some distance forward, were near enough to the In- 
dian fort to hear the revelry of the garrison, which 
lasted till midnight. The savages had seen the Eng- 
lish sail past some days before, and thought they were 
afraid and durst not come near them. 



Connecticut Beginnings 169 

Before daybreak the English were again on the march. 
Two miles of an Indian trail brought them to a pali- 
saded fort on what is still known as Pequot Hill 
near the Mystic River. A part of the English stole 
up the hill from the south and the rest from the north. 
There were no sentinels, and the garrison was sound 
asleep. When within a rod of the pahsade an Indian 
cur barked, and 
a Pequot war- 
rior shouted, 
" Englishmen ! 
Englishmen !" 

At once the 
assaulting 
party fired a 

volley through 
.1 1 1 On Pequot Hill. Here the Indians had a 

° fort that the whites assailed and destroyed 

fences. This 

was answered by a terrific yell. The English tore 
down the piles of brush that served for gates and 
swarmed into the fort. But the Pequots remained in 
their wigwams, and some of them shot from the doors. 
Mason drove them out of one wigwam, caught up a 
brand from the fire inside, and apphed it to the mats 
which covered the framework. Instantly the wigwam 
was ablaze. A rising wind fanned the flames and 
caused them to spread rapidly through the fort. 

Soon the heat was so intense that the English with- 
drew from the enclosure. But no such privilege was 




170 New England 

allowed the Indians. All were killed or burned to 
death except seven who broke through the English 
lines, and seven who were captured. There were 
four or five hundred of them — men, women, and 
children. 

Two of Mason's party were killed and about twenty 
wounded. Some of them were saved from arrow 
wounds by their neck-cloths. A piece of cheese in 
the pocket of another stopped an arrow. One of the 
officers, who saw the warriors of two hostile tribes en- 
gaged in a battle, on a later occasion, said they fought 
in such a manner that neither party would have killed 
seven men in seven years. Each combatant shot his 
arrow into the air at such an elevation that it would 
drop on an adversary, but the person aimed at usually 
took the precaution to step aside. 

The English carried their wounded to New London 
harbor, half a dozen miles away. Their vessels met 
them, and then they made their way to the mouth of 
the Connecticut where Lion Gardiner greeted them 
with a salute of the guns of his fort. 

When the whites departed from the Pequot country 
the surviving members of the tribe gathered at the ruins 
of their stronghold and shrieked and tore their hair. 
The next day they held a council and decided that it 
was impossi])le for them to resist the power of the 
strangers, and they concluded their only recourse 
was to all emigrate beyond the Hudson. 

They therefore burned their villages and supplies, 



Connecticut Beginnings 



71 



and set out on this desperate venture. Some soon 
turned back, but were later all killed or captured by 
whites and friendly Indians. The main body of the 
tribe, after crossing the Connecticut River far enough 
north to avoid the English at Saybrook, continued 
along the shore of the Sound in order to get a daily 
supply of food by digging shellfish. They travelled 
very slowly. 

The English and Mohegans set forth to follow 
them, the former on their ships, the latter on land. 
From time to time they overtook stragglers and de- 
stroyed or captured them. Near Guilford a Pequot 
chief and some companions, when closely pressed by 




New London Harbor 



their pursuers, swam across the harbor from the end 
of the cape on its eastern side. But they were shot 



172 New England 

as they landed by some Mohegans in ambush. The 
victors cut off the head of the Pequot chief and lodged 
it in the branches of an oak, where it stayed for years. 
Since then the spot has been called " Sachem's Head." 

The remnant of the fugitive tribe at length took 
refuge with some local Indians whose village was in a 
swamp a few miles west of Bridgeport. Their pursuers 
surrounded the swamp and sent in a call for surrender. 
In response the Indian villagers and the Pequot women 
and children gave themselves up. About one hundred 
warriors remained in the swamp, and they crept to 
its borders and shot forth their ineffectual arrows at 
the besiegers all the following night. In the early 
morning they made a burst for freedom. A heavy 
fog favored them, and three-fourths of them broke 
through their enemy's line and got away. They were 
pursued, and many of them were found dead. The 
fate of the rest is unknown. 

The prisoners were made slaves, some of them in 
Connecticut and Massachusetts, and others in the 
West Indies. They were not very satisfactory in 
servitude to their masters, and they seemed to be 
physically unfitted for it, for few of them survived 
long. 

Connecticut's other tribes deeded away their land 
with more or less celerity, and when it was all gone 
they drifted off to other parts of the country, or be- 
came town charges. 




An old-fashioned tall clock in a country home 
Industry in Connecticut 

NEARLY all the interests of the population of Con- 
necticut until after 1800 were agricultural. By 
that time the whole commonwealth was dotted with 
towns ; and in the heart of each was a common, a 
church, and a group of wooden houses, usually com- 
173 



174 New England 

fortable, but often unpainted, and seldom representing 
even a moderate degree of luxury. Hartford and New 
Haven were the only cities, and neither of them had 
four thousand inhabitants. It was rumored, some- 
what doubtfully, that the leading lawyer of the state 
had an income from his practice of two thousand 
dollars a year. There were few persons who were 
very rich, and few who were very poor, and life was 
equable and placid. 

An important crop, almost from the first, was to- 
bacco. Its cultivation was officially encouraged as 
far back as 1640, but its use was forbidden to any 
man under twenty-one, unless he obtained a certificate 
from a physician that tobacco was good for him. No 
one was allowed to smoke or chew on the streets or 
in other public places. Tobacco has ever since been 
extensively grown on the fertile lowlands where the 
first settlers established themselves. Soil and climate 
both seem particularly well adapted to its cultivation. 
The amount now raised is thirty-five million pounds 
a year, but this looks small when compared with the 
three hundred and sixty-four million pounds raised in 
Kentucky, the leader among tobacco-growing states. 

Much tobacco is grown throughout all the eastern 
coast region of our country, and the prosperity of the 
colonies was largely due to the foreign demand for this 
crop. Tobacco was unknown in the Old World until 
after the discovery of America, but when it had once 
been introduced there its use spread amazingly. It 



Industry in Connecticut 175 

is one of a number of important plants that origi- 
nally were found only in America. Some of the others 
are Indian corn, the potato, the tomato, and the 




Cutting tobacco 

cinchona from which quinine comes. On the other 
hand, America only contributed one animal to the 
domestic uses of civilized man — the turkey. 

Connecticut has many excellent dairy farms, market 
gardens, and peach orchards, but except on the valley 
lowlands its soil is not very productive. 

One of the state's earliest manufacturing industries 
dates back to 1740 when a man named Patterson settled 
at Berhn, eleven miles south of Hartford, and began to 
make tinware. For a time he was the only tinner in 
the colonies. He would make up as much of the ware 
as he could carry in a basket, and then tramp over the 
surrounding country from hamlet to hamlet and from 
farm to farm selling the new kind of utensils. Pres- 



176 New England 

ently others took up the business, and gradually the 
tinware peddlers made their way to all parts of the 
country. 

Carrying the goods in hand baskets was soon aban- 
doned. Instead, they were put into large panniers on 
the back of a horse, and later two-wheeled carts were 
used. Some of the peddlers are said not to have con- 
fined themselves to seUing tinware and useful "Yan- 
kee notions," but to have palmed off wooden nutmegs, 
oak-leaf cigars, and similar frauds. 

The four-wheeled gay-painted tin-peddler's wagon 
finally came into existence, and there was scarcely a 
farm home in all New England which was not visited 
by them. The wares were usually exchanged for 
local products or rags, rather than sold for money, and 
the peddlers were sure of a welcome, especially in the 
sparsely settled sections. Not only was there a de- 
sire to traffic with them, but they were an important 
source of news from other parts of the region and the 
outside world. Often they were men of superior in- 
telligence with a shrewd business talent that in some 
instances won them fortunes afterward as manufac- 
turers, merchants, and financiers. The old-time Yan- 
kee peddler was a man worth knowing. 

It has been said that all the minerals known to man 
may be found in Connecticut in just sufficient quan- 
tities not to pay for mining them. Prospectors have 
pitted with shallow holes the entire range of sandstone 
hills which stretches from the northern part of the state 



Industry in Connecticut 177 

down to New Haven. Some of them discovered a 
promising vein of copper in 1705, sixteen miles north- 
west of Hartford at what is now East Granby. Various 
companies spent money freely mining this copper, but 
got little of their investment back. After nearly three 
quarters of a century operations ceased, and in 1773 the 
colony fitted up the mine as a prison. Its first keeper 
named it Newgate after a famous prison in London. 

The main opening into the mine was near the top 
of a small, bare hill. Cells were prepared along several 
galleries, the lowest sixty feet from the surface. The 
first man sent to the prison had a sweetheart working in 
a neighboring farmhouse, and on the eighteenth night 
of his confinement she contrived to draw him up through 
one of the shafts in a bucket that had been used for 
hoisting ore. x\fter that the prison remained empty 
for about two months. 

Probably the number of inmates never much exceeded 
thirty. Handcuffs and fetters were used freely, and 
gratings were put over the unguarded air shafts, but 
this did not entirely prevent escapes. Once practi- 
cally all the prisoners got away after overpowering the 
guards. The walled-in buildings at the entrance, the 
gloomy underground cells, and everything about the 
place were repellant, and it is no wonder that the pris- 
oners used all their ingenuity to get away. One pris- 
oner was a negro murderer who for twenty years was 
kept chained to the rock in the deepest part of the 
mine. He slept on a low ledge and drank from a little 



178 New England 

pool near at hand into which some water trickled. At 
last, to entertain himself, he slipped his shackles up 
over his knees. There they fitted so tightly as to cause 
an irritation that resulted in blood poisoning, and his 
legs had to be cut off. He was then given his freedom 
and lived for years afterward. 

Some of the prisoners worked in a prison shop mak- 
ing shoes, and others tramped the revolving stairway 
of a treadmill that furnished power to grind grain. 
One prisoner, who had earned fifty dollars working 
overtime shoemaking, bribed a keeper with half the 
money to help him to escape. That was in 1827, 
and only a single night remained before the prison 
was to be abandoned, and the prisoners removed 
to Wethersfield. Far down in the mine was a well 
brimming full of pure cool water, twenty-six feet 
deep. Above the well was an open shaft down which 
the bribed keeper let a rope on that last night. The 
prisoner gripped it and was drawn up, but when nearly 
to the surface the keeper cut the rope, and the prisoner 
plunged down into the well and was drowned. 

Iron of exceptionally fine quahty was early dis- 
covered at Salisbury in the northwestern part of the 
state. The deposits were abundant, and the supply of 
wood, then the universal fuel, was plentiful. For a long 
time the making of nails from this iron was the prin- 
cipal home industry of the Connecticut colonists. 
Much of the iron used for the weapons of the Revolu- 
tion came from there. Cannon were made from it for 



Industry in Connecticut 



179 



the army and nav>^, barrels for the muskets, and 
heavy chains to bar the rivers. 

In this vicinity is Bear Mountain, the highest point 
in Connecticut. Its summit is 2355 feet above the sea 
level. 

One of the first of Connecticut's inventors to win 
fame was David Bushnell, who was born on his father's 
farm in the little coast town of Westbrook. He pre- 
pared for college after he reached manhood, entered 
Yale at the age of twenty-nine, and graduated just as 
the Revolution was beginning. Then he turned his 




Bear Mountain, the highest m Luiiih.(.lh_ul 



attention to making what was a forerunner of the 
submarine. He called it the American Turtle. It 



i8o New England 

was seven and one half feet long and nearly as wide, 
and there was just space enough inside to contain one 
man. The man propelled it by working paddles with 
his feet. Under the keel was ballast which could be 
lowered to act as an anchor. A compass was carried 
to aid in steering, and a barometer to determine the 
depth below the surface. The boat could be made 
to descend by admitting water through a valve, and 
to rise by expelling the water with a pump. The 
supply of air was sufficient to last the man half an 
hour. There were windows of heavy glass, and phos- 
phorus was used to obtain additional light. At the 
stern, above the rudder, was a receptacle which con- 
tained one hundred and fifty pounds of powder. This 
could be attached to the bottom of a ship, and a 
mechanism inside exploded the powder after a certain 
interval. 

The inventor thought the entire British navy on 
our coasts could be blown out of the water. The 
first trial of the turtle was made in New York harbor. 
A sergeant set forth in it and got under the British 
man-of-war. Eagle, but did not succeed in attaching 
the magazine to the bottom. He had started to re- 
turn when he fancied that the enemy had discovered 
him, and in his alarm he cast off the magazine. It 
was timed to explode in an hour, which it did, much 
to the consternation of the British. 

Later Bushnell himself tried to blow up a man-of- 
war anchored off New Haven. He failed to do so, but 



Industry in Connecticut i 8 1 

did succeed in blowing up an enemy schooner which 
lay just astern of the larger vessel, and three men 
were killed. 

Soon after the Revolution Eh Terry of Windsor 
made some small-sized wooden clocks to hang on the 
wall, and presently he hired two men to help in their 
manufacture. The case, the dial, and various other 
parts were of wood, and some of the work was done 
with a jack-knife. There was often difficulty in get- 
ting just the right kind of wood, and when it was ob- 
tained it required many months' seasoning before it 
could be used. 

Twice a year Mr. Terry would pack up some of the 
clocks and make a journey to peddle them at twenty- 
five dollars each. In 1807 he and some associates 
bought an old mill at Waterbury to get the aid of 
machinery in the clock-making. A few years later an 
apprentice introduced a circular saw. This helped re- 
duce the cost of manufacture and the price, and ped- 
dlers sold the clocks in all parts of the Union. 

The clock with brass works was invented in 1837, 
and machine-made Connecticut clocks and watches 
were soon being exported. Their excellence and 
cheapness made them favorites the world over. 

A remarkable variety of manufactured articles is 
produced in the state, but brass goods constitute fully 
one-fourth of the whole in value, and Waterbury is the 
most noted centre of the industry in America. 
. When a machine was invented for making pins at 



82 



New England 



one operation the manufacture was established at 
Derby, Connecticut, in 1835, because in that vicinity 
competent mechanics could be found who had gained 
expertness by working on brass clocks. 

Different towns and cities in the state have in a 
number of instances won a notable reputation for a 
particular product in which they excel. Thompson- 
ville, north of Hartford, has its great carpet mills; 

Danbury is 
America's lead- 
ing community 
for the manu- 
facture of hats, 
and the pro- 
duction of cot- 
ton thread and 
sewing silk has 

made Willi- 
Some of the Meriden Hanging Hills ^^^^-^ ^^^^^^^ 

One of the important manufacturing towns is Meri- 
den, and not far from the town are the famous 
Hanging Hills. They are fiat-topped, but rise very 
abruptly from the valley. 

Meriden's manufacturing enterprises began in 1791 
with the making of cut nails. A few years after- 
ward pewter buttons and dishes were manufactured. 
Later still the making of silver-plated ware developed 
into such an industry that Meriden became known as 
''The Silver City." 





Erick-laden schooners on Long Island Sound near Stonington 
Along the Connecticut Shore 

THE place in Connecticut that has the most inhabit- 
ants is New Haven. It is sometimes called "The 
Elm City," there are so many fine trees of that variety 
adorning its parks and streets. The first settlers were 
attracted to it by its excellent harbor. They came in 
183 



I 84 New England 

the autumn of 1637, built a hut, and left a few men to 
try the winter cUmate. The main party arrived in 
the spring, and their minister preached his first sermon 
there under an oak tree on April i8th. 

Two distinguished fugitives found refuge in New 
Haven early in the year 1661. They were Generals 
Goffe and Whalley who had been members of the court 
that condemned King Charles I of England to death. 
Now Charles II had come to the throne, and a price 
was set on the heads of these two " regicides." Officers 
were sent from Boston to arrest them, but found their 
errand blocked at New Haven by the most exasperating 
obstacles. Their documents were read aloud in public 
meetings instead of being treated as secret- service 
business, and when the Sabbath came the minister 
regaled them with a sermon from the text: "Hide 
the outcasts; bewray not him that wandereth; let 
my outcasts dwell with thee, Moab ; be thou a covert 
to them from the face of the spoiler." 

Every precaution was taken to conceal the regicides. 
They moved from one house to another, they hid 
under a bridge over which the searchers passed, they 
were for a time in the woods, and for a time in an old 
mill. Then they went to the top of West Rock, a 
steep crag about two miles from the town, where a 
cave was prepared for them in a pile of rocks. There 
they continued for several months. After that they 
dwelt in Milford, in great seclusion, for three years. 
Finally, news of their being in that place got to the 



Along the Connecticut Shore 185 

king's officers, and Connecticut seemed no longer a safe 
retreat. So they went away, travelling only by night, 
to the frontier village of Hadley, in Massachusetts. 

New Haven is the home of Yale University, one of 
the oldest, largest, and best-known of American edu- 
cational institutions. The need of a college was felt 
in Connecticut almost from the first, but it was gen- 
erally agreed that the resources of the whole of New 
England were barely enough to support Harvard. At 
length, however, in 1700, ten ministers met at Bran- 




New Haven Green 



ford and each laid on a table a contribution of books, 
saying, "I give these books for the founding of a col- 
lege in this colony." The whole number was about 
forty volumes. 



1 86 New England 

The next year the General Court voted the college 
a small grant of money, and Saybrook was chosen as 
the place where it was to be established. But because 
its first rector was the minister at Killingworth the 
library and students were housed there. The com- 
mencements, however, took place at Saybrook. The 
college had just one student for the first six months, 
and the total number of graduates in fifteen years was 
only fifty-five. For instruction the early pupils were 
largely dependent on the ten ministers who were 
trustees. 

After a while the rector died, and the library and 
some of the students were transferred to Saybrook. 
Other students went to Milford where the new rector 
lived. Finally, in 1716, the trustees voted to remove 
the college to New Haven. Meanwhile good friends 
in England had been contributing books and money 
to help it along. One of these benefactors was Elihu 
Yale, who was born at New Haven in 1648, but who, 
when ten years old, had been taken to England by his 
father, and had never returned. He became a wealthy 
merchant, and for a time was a government official 
in India. His gifts in money to the college amounted 
to £400, and the trustees gave the college his name. 

The locating of the college in New Haven was the 
cause of much dissatisfaction, for several other towns 
thought they had a better claim to it. A portion of 
the students seceded, and for two years were taught 
at Wethersfield. Saybrook protested against the re- 



Along the Connecticut Shore 187 

moval of the library. In the night, the wagons on 
which the books had been loaded ready to start in the 
morning were broken , and the horses that were to draw 
them were turned loose, and bridges on the New 
Haven turnpike were cut away. When the library 
at last reached its destination, many of the books were 
missing. 

One of the most interesting of the colonial members 
of the faculty was Rev. Naphtali Daggett, who for a 
quarter of a century was the college preacher. On 
Monday, July 5, 1779, the townspeople had begun to 
celebrate the Declaration of Independence, when they 
were thrown into consternation by the news that a 
fleet of forty-eight vessels had dropped anchor at West 
Haven, and that three thousand men were marching 
against the town. 

Hasty levies made ready to oppose the enemy, and 
the college preacher joined them. His comrades no 
sooner came within range of the British bullets than 
they took to their heels, but he stood his ground, 
and, though wounded, loaded and fired until a de- 
tachment charged and captured him. The officer in 
command inquired, not very gently, " What are 
you doing here, you old fool, firing on his Majesty's 
troops?" 

"Exercising the rights of war," he replied grimly. 

Here is what happened to him afterward in his own 
words : " 'Midst a thousand insults, my infernal driver 
hastened me along farther than my strength would ad- 



I 88 New England 

mit in the extreme heat of the day, weakened as I was 
by the loss of blood, which could not be less than a 




©KalkhoffCo.,N. Y. 

A few of the three hundred and sixty-five Thimble Islands, 
between New Haven and Guilford 

quart. When I failed in some degree through faint- 
ness he would strike me on the back with a heavy walk- 
ing-staff, and kick me behind with his foot. At length, 
I arrived at the Green in New Haven and obtained 
leave of an officer to be carried into the Widow Ly- 
man's and laid on a bed, where I lay the rest of the 
day and the succeeding night in such acute pain as 
I never felt before." 

The town was given up to plunder, but the British 
retired after being in it only overnight. 

At the outbreak of the Revolution Benedict Arnold 
was a New Haven druggist and bookseller with a shop 



Along the Connecticut Shore 189 

near the Green. When news of the Battle of Lexing- 
ton came he mustered a little company of patriots and 
led the way to the powder house where he demanded 
and received the keys. 

The nineteenth of May, 1780, was the famous "Dark 
Day." The Connecticut Legislature was in session in 
the old State House on the Green when the sudden 
darkness fell. Many believed the Judgment Day had 
arrived. In the midst of the excitement a motion was 
made to adjourn. Then Colonel Davenport rose, and 
said: "I am against an adjournment. If this is not 
the Day of Judgment there is no cause for adjourn- 
ment. If it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I 
wish, therefore, that candles may be brought, and we 
proceed to business." 

The darkness began in the middle of the morning 
and continued the rest of the day. Persons were un- 
able to read common print or to tell the time of day by 
their clocks and watches. The birds sang their even- 
ing songs and became silent, and the fowls retired to 
roost. Clouds covered the sky, and a southwest wind 
blew. The air had a brassy hue, and it is probable 
that the darkness was caused by the smoke of a forest 
fire. 

In colonial days a good deal of New Haven's energy 
was directed to the export of meat and lumber to the 
West Indies, but in more recent times manufacturing 
has been its leading interest. The New York and 
New Haven Railroad has its main offices and con- 



i^o New England 

struction and repair shops in the city, and gives support 
to a tenth of the people. 

One of the greatest of New Haven's contributions 
to industry was the inventor, Charles Goodyear, who 
was born there in 1800. His father was a hardware 
merchant, and when he was old enough he engaged in 
the same business. But he failed, and his health broke 
down, and often afterward he was imprisoned for debt. 
He spent ten years experimenting with rubber to make 
it available for waterproof shoes, clothing, and other 
articles. People thought he was crazy. A stranger 
who was inquiring what he looked like received this 
reply. "If you see a man who wears a rubber coat, 
cap, vest, and shoes, and has a rubber purse without a 
cent in it, that is Charles Goodyear." 

He even pawned his children's school-books to get 
money to buy rubber for his experiments. At last, 
when he one day had a mixture of sulphur and rubber 
on the kitchen stove, he chanced to subject it to just 
the right intensity of heat, and achieved success. 
After he had patiently perfected his discovery and 
adapted it to different uses, sixty patents were re- 
quired to secure his inventions. However, because of 
fraud and mistakes and lawsuits, he gathered little 
from his years of toil and privation except the honors 
awarded to his skill and perseverance. He gave to 
the world a staple now apphed to hundreds of uses, 
and employing many thousands of workmen in its 
manufacture. 



Along the Connecticut Shore 19 




A harbor view of Bridgeport 

Another great industrial city on the Connecticut 
coast is Bridgeport. Here are made such articles 
as pianos, sewing machines, toys, ammunition, 
cutlery, and typewriters. 

This was the home of 
P. T. Barnum, whose 
"Greatest Show on 
Earth" had a world-wide 
fame. The successor to 
his circus still has its win- 
ter quarters in the city. 
"General Tom Thumb," 
one of the notable attrac- 
tions of the "Greatest 
oi )) 1 4. "Tom Thumb" and his wife, 

Show, was born at , + ^^i, of 

' who were noteworthy at- 

Bridgeportini838. When tractions in P. T. Barnum's 
first exhibited he was less "Greatest Show on Earth." 



h^ 


■ 




^ 


I^^^^V '" 


^ 


^m 1 


^ 




sjii^s 



192 New England 

than two feet high and weighed sixteen pounds. Later 
he increased somewhat in height and grew stout. 

Benjamin FrankHn often used to pass over the old 
post road along the coast between Philadelphia and 
Boston. Once he stopped for the night at a tavern 
near Saybrook. The weather was frosty, and when 
he went in he found all the space before the blazing 
fire occupied by a group of village politicians swapping 
news. Thereupon he ordered the landlord to give 
his horse a peck of oysters in the shell. The entire 
company of villagers went out to see the miracle of a 
horse devouring oysters. When the landlord returned 
with the announcement that the horse refused to eat 
the oysters, Franklin was found comfortably seated in 
the warmest corner quite willing to make a meal of the 
oysters himself. 

A stream which was the original west boundary of 
New London was the scene of a very odd incident 
toward the end of winter in 1646. A young Saybrook 
couple wished to be married, and as the magistrate in 
their own place was away they sent word to Governor 
John Winthrop at New London that they would ride 
thither to have him perform the ceremony. He con- 
cluded to ride to meet them. Both he and the wedding 
party got as far as the boundary stream, and found it 
in flood and the ice broken up. They could not cross, 
but the marriage took place just the same. The gov- 
ernor on his side of the stream pronounced them man 
and wife, and they on the other side promised to love, 



Along the Connecticut Shore 193 

honor, and obey. Since then the stream has been called 
"Bride Brook." 

Winthrop had a gristmill in a rocky glen near New 
London, and on that spot a gristmill still stands with 
a great waterwheel on the outside of the building. It 
is one of the most interesting colonial relics in New 



^ifl^BsPR^w^ * ^ " 


llmK^^P^mHi ^S^r.JL^r {^^'^^^^^H 




_]^V • •- .^ '-•'^^^^ - «iH^H 


hrMltli»Vn T ^ — 


^^^^^ 


^m ^ ^ 


WBm^SS£^0I^^Si^^^^^ y" ^ ' "^ '^S^K^^^^I 




.^3^ ^.- . ^'^*^' fpr^^r^^^fje 







The old grist mill at New London 

England. This mill was erected in 171 2, and even now 
it continues to grind as of old. 

New London had a thriving West India trade dur- 
ing the half century that preceded the Revolution. 
Its cargoes for export mostly came from the region 
north and west, and this same region absorbed the 
larger portion of the imports. Some of the heavy 
wagons that transported the goods to and from the 



194 New England 

town were drawn by oxen, and others by horses. Four 
animals were hitched to each wagon. It was nothing 
uncommon for a hundred of these big creaking vehicles 
to arrive from widely scattered points and pass in pro- 
cession down the town streets, raising suffocating clouds 
of dust. The teamsters were muscular, red-shirted 
fellows, each armed with a long whip, which he would 
now and then flourish in a way to make it snap with a 
report like a pistol. 

The wagons brought wheat and peas in bags, corn in 
barrels, casks of hams, pork, and beef, savory cheeses, 
pots of butter, and piles of staves and hoops for making 
barrels. After the loads had been delivered at the 
docks the drivers would assemble at a near-by tavern. 
There they would indulge in merry carousals, and in 
the evening would perhaps parade the streets in noisy 
bands to the great dismay of the order-loving citizens. 
The next morning they would load their wagons 
with sugar, molasses, and other goods, and drive off 
homeward. 

The place fared badly in the Revolution. Not only 
did commerce come to a standstill, but in Sep- 
tember, 1871, Benedict Arnold, whose birthplace was 
only fourteen miles distant at Norwich, arrived with a 
British fleet, and burned the town's dwelUngs, ware- 
houses, and shipping. 

The town was rebuilt, but the old sea traffic failed 
to revive. Brown sea-moss gathered on the unused 
wharves, great ships lay idly at their moorings until 



Along the Connecticut Shore 195 

they fell to pieces with age and neglect, and the only 
occupants of the waterside warehouses were rats and 
cockroaches. 

Then came a period when the town engaged in the 
whahng industry, and New London vessels voyaged to 
the remotest seas. Keen eyes were ever on the watch 
for returning whaleships, and if one arrived which 
was long overdue, or had been reported lost, the church 
bells were rung. When she reached the wharf a crowd, 
mostly of women and children, were there to greet her. 

Along the entire Connecticut coast many people are 
engaged in the planting of oyster beds, and dredging 
for oysters. The sheltered waters of Long Island 
Sound favor the growth of oysters, and nearly all the 
bottom on the Connecticut side is privately owned, 
and devoted to oyster culture. 

When oysters are young they are quite active and 
swim about freely in the water. Presently, however, 
they go to the bottom, attach themselves to rocks or 
other hard objects and grow shells. Therefore, it has 
come to be the practice to scatter mother oysters over 
selected portions of the salt water shallows, and at the 
spawning season to spread the same ground with boat 
loads of old oyster shells to which the young oysters 
may fasten. For the rest of their lives they remain in 
the same position, unless accident or the rake of an 
oysterman dislodges them. The methods adopted 
have resulted in the growth of great numbers of oysters 
where formerly there were few. 




Putnam's Wolf Den 



Connecticut Places and Famous People 

rpiHERE are several queer irregularities in the Con- 
J- necticut boundary line. The line was fixed by 
commissioners, of whose work at a certain stage the 
famous lawyer, Rufus Choate, said: "They might as 
well have decided that the line between the states was 
196 



Connecticut Places and People 197 

bounded on the north by a bramble bush, on the south 
by a bluejay, on the west by a hive of bees in swarming 
time, and on the east by five hundred foxes with fire- 
brands tied to their tails." 

The eastern line, which follows the crooked course of 
a small river for a few miles back from the coast, was 
the result of long wrangling which almost led to the 
use of force. Various shifts were made in the northern 
line, and even now it has a curious jog due to careless sur- 




The Lake of the Three States, where the boundary lines of 

Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York meet. Each 

of the distant mountains is in a different state 



veying. The irregularities of the western hne are more 
or less the result of chance and primitive conditions. 



198 



New England 



Hartford is the capital of the state. It is a great 
trading and business centre which owes much of its 
growth to its position at the head of navigation of the 
Connecticut. There are extensive manufacturing plants 
in the city, and it is the home of many great insurance 
companies. Among its important manufactures are 

pistols, rifles, and ma- 
chine guns, rubber 
goods, electrical sup- 
pHes, bicycles, and 
automobiles. 

The city is noted for 
its many parks, fine 
trees, and handsome 
residences. A visitor 
is apt to declare that 
it is the second most 
beautiful place in the 
United States, the visi- 
tor's home place, of 
course, ranking first. 
Formerly New Haven 
and Hartford were both capitals of the state, and the 
meetings of the legislature were held in each in alter- 
nate years, but Hartford has been the sole capital since 

1873. 

One of the most famous episodes in its history was 
the attempt in 1687 of the British colonial governor, 
Andros, to seize Connecticut's charter, which his 




A clock tower in a Hartford park 



Connecticut Places and People 



99 



government had concluded was too liberal. He came 
to Hartford accompanied by sixty soldiers to enforce 
his demand for the charter. The colonial assembly 
met him in the meeting-house and its members ex- 
plained at great length how dear the charter was to 
them, and how reluctant they were to give it up. Eve- 
ning came and candles were lighted. The case had be- 
come desperate for the colonists. They had been 
compelled to bring in 
the charter, and there 
it lay on the table 
before the eyes of 
Andros. Suddenly 

the lights were blown 
out, and Captain 
Wadsworth of Hart- 
ford slipped out of the 
meeting-house with 
the charter and hid it 
in a big hollow oak 
tree near by. When 

the candles were relighted the assembly was no longer 
able to comply with Andros's demand. 

Two years later a new king came on to the British 
throne, and Connecticut resumed its government 
under the old charter. This charter still exists and 
is one of the chief historical treasures of the state. 
The oak tree survived until 1856, when its venerable 
trunk was prostrated in an August gale. It measured 




The Charter Oak, in which Captain 
Wadsworth hid the colonial charter 



200 



New England 



twenty-one feet in circumference at a height of seven 
feet from the gound. 

The first American woolen mill was started in Hart- 
ford in 1788, and some of the cloth woven in this mill 

was made into 
a suit which 
George Wash- 
ington wore 
when he was 
inaugurated 
President at 
New York the 
next year. 

New Eng- 
land is famous 
for its woolen 
goods, but only 
a small num- 
ber of sheep 
are now kept 
in its pastures. 
Most of the 
wool comes 
from Ohio and 
states farther 
west, and from AustraHa. When it has been washed 
and freed from such things as burs and sticks, it is un- 
tangled and combed out straight. Afterward it is 
twisted into yarn. The yarn is woven into cloth for 




Connecticut's State House 



Connecticut Places and People 201 

men's suits and overcoats, and is used for blankets, 
stockings, carpets, and many other articles. Nearly all 
of our garments are made of either wool or cotton, 
or the two mixed. 

Hartford is indebted for one of its most important 
industries to the inventor, Samuel Colt, who was born 
in that city in 1 814. At the age of sixteen he ran 
away to sea and voyaged to India. On this voyage he 
made a wooden model of what won world-wide fame 
later as " Colt's Revolver." A company which started 
its manufacture failed, and not until a demand was 
created by the Mexican War did the present great 
firearms company begin its successful career. 

Mark Twain, one of the world's greatest humorists, 
wrote most of his famous books in Hartford. The 
city was his home for nearly all his life after 1871. 

Noah Webster of dictionary fame was born at West 
Hartford in 1758. For the first fifteen years of his life 
he lived at home, attended the village school, and 
did the usual work which falls to the lot of a farmer's 
son. After that he fitted himself for college and went 
to Yale, where he graduated in 1778. His father then 
gave him an eight-dollar Continental bill, worth at 
the time about half its face value in specie, and told 
him he must henceforth rely on his own exertions. So 
he resorted to school teaching, at first in Hartford, 
and later in other places. 

About this time he compiled his famous blue-covered 
spelling-book, the most widely used school-book ever 



202 



New England 



published. Its sales for a considerable period were 
over a million copies a year, and during the twenty 
years that Webster was engaged in preparing his 
dictionary the profits from that one little school-book 
furnished the entire support of his family, though his 
copyright receipts were less than one cent a book. 

In 1798 Webster became a 
resident of New Haven and 
there began work on his dic- 
tionary. He died in that 
city at the age of eighty-five, 
while busy on a second re- 
vision. 

That greatest of colonial 
theologians, Jonathan Ed- 
wards, was born at South 
Windsor in 1703. His father 
was pastor of the church 
there for sixty-three years 
and served nowhere else. 
Jonathan was one of eleven children. He was the 
only boy. The girls all grew to a height of six feet, 
and their father used to speak of them jocularly as 
his sixty feet of daughters. Jonathan studied Latin at 
eight years of age, and at thirteen entered Yale, where 
he graduated four years later with the highest honors. 
When he was nineteen he began to preach. 

Litchfield was the home of another famous minis- 
terial family. Lyman Beecher, one of the foremost 




Noah Webster, whose dic- 
tionary is famous the 
world over 



Connecticut Places and People 203 



American preachers of his time, was pastor there for 
sixteen years beginning with 18 10. He had thirteen 
children, seven of whom were sons, and these sons all 
became preachers. The most famous of the seven, 
Henry Ward Beecher, was born at Litchfield. As a 
boy he had little aptitude for study and wanted to go 
to sea. Instead, he continued his education and 
graduated at Amherst College. 
He won no laurels in the routine 
college lessons, but displayed 
marked abihty in writing and 
debating. For most of his life 
he was pastor of Plymouth 
Church in Brooklyn, where his 
congregation was one of the 
largest in the United States. 

His sister, Harriet Beecher 
Stowe, the novelist, was also 
born at Litchfield. She for a 
time taught school in Hartford, 
and in 1864 became a permanent 
resident of that city. 

An entertaining incident in Litchfield's history oc- 
curred on a pleasant September morning in 1780 when 
General Washington passed through the place. One 
of the local residents was Appleton Kilbourne, a 
methodical farmer, who probably never went ten miles 
from home in his life. On the morning mentioned he 
mounted Dobbin and started for the mill with a couple 




Harriet Beecher Stowe, 

the author of "Uncle 

Tom's Cabin" 



204 New England 

of bags of grain. He was passing a tavern at a corner 
when a friend called out, "Hi, Uncle App, you're a 
little too late!" 

"Too late for what?" Uncle App asked. 

"Why, General Washington and his escort have 
just left here," was the reply. "Look to the west- 
ward — there they go." 

Uncle App at once urged Dobbin in that direction, 
at full speed, the bags flopping with every bound 
of the horse, and the rider's coattails streaming 
out behind. He passed the military procession, 
then suddenly wheeled his horse, and confronted the 
chieftain. 

"Are you General Washington ? " he inquired. 

"I am, sir," Washington replied. 

"God Almighty bless you!" Uncle App exclaimed 
waving his hat in the air. Then he quietly pursued 
his way to the mill. 

One of Connecticut's heroes of the Revolution was 
" Old Put," as General Israel Putman was affectionately 
called. He came as a young man, shortly after his 
marriage, to the eastern part of the state and settled 
in what is now the village of Brooklyn. In a few years 
he had a comfortable home and well-fenced clearings. 
Many sheep were kept in the region, and these suf- 
fered from the ravages of a certain she-wolf. Her 
footprints were easily recognized, for she had at some 
time been caught in a trap and escaped by leaving the 
toes of one foot behind. At last Putman entered into 



Connecticut Places and People 205 



an agreement with five of his neighbors to watch for 
and follow the wolf until she was killed. 

They began the pursuit immediately after a light 
fall of snow at the opening of winter. Over the hills 
through forest and swamp they went until the wolf 
entered a den 
in the rocks. 
Here a guard 
was set, and 
a crowd of 
men and boys 
as semb led 
with dogs and 
guns, straw 
and sulphur. 
A fire was 
made in the 
mouth of the 
cave, but the smoke and fumes escaped too readily 
from the crevices to be effective. 

The hours passed until nearly midnight, and then 
Putnam announced that he would go into the cave 
to investigate. After fastening a rope to one of his 
legs and ordering those outside to pull him forth when 
he signalled by kicking the rope, he took off his coat and 
vest, and, armed only with a torch, crawled in at the 
opening. He had advanced about twenty feet when 
he saw the glaring eyeballs of the wolf at the farther 
end of the cavity, scarcely three yards distant. A 




"Satan's Kingdom," a wild section in the 
western part of the state 



2o6 New England 

hearty kick at the rope caused his friends to hastily 
pull him out, much to the detriment of his clothes 
and person. But he at once called for his gun, and 
back he went. As soon as he was near enough to see 
the wolf distinctly he took aim and fired. The con- 
cussion and the smoke almost overpowered him, but 
the crowd outside hauled him forth into the open air, 
where he quickly revived. Then for a third time he 
entered the cave. He found the wolf dead, seized her 

by the ears, 
kicked the 
rope, and out 
he was dragged 
with the wolf 
in his wake. 

News of the 
Battle of Lex- 

„ 1 r. . > 1 1 ington reached 

General Putnam s plough ° 

Putnam while 

he was ploughing in an outlying field, two miles 

from the village. When the mounted courier came 

along beating a drum at intervals and calling out the 

news to such persons as he saw, Old Put unhitched 

his oxen from the plough, and bade one of his 

boys, who was with him, to go home and tell Mrs. 

Putnam that he had gone to fight the British. 

Then he mounted his horse, on which he had ridden 

to the field that morning, and dashed away toward 

Boston. 




Connecticut Places and People 207 

He was noted for his energy and courage. The 
scene of one of his most daring exploits was the old 
town of Greenwich in the extreme southwestern 
corner of the state. A peninsula which reaches out 
on the west side of Greenwich harbor was used as a pas- 
ture for horses in the early days, and a settlement which 
grew up in its vicinity was called Horseneck. On the 
summit of a steep hill there, a httle church was built. 
Putnam was in this region with a small force in Feb- 
ruary 1779 when a British foraying party of over two 
thousand cavalry and foot soldiers was discovered 
approaching. 

To oppose them Putnam had only one hundred and 
fifty men and two pieces of artillery. He stationed 
his force on the brow of the steep rocky hill near the 
church, and when the enemy drew near received them 
with several well-directed volleys. They prepared to 
charge, and Putnam ordered his men to retire. He 
himself lingered until the British cavalry was close at 
hand. The road down the hill was circuitous, and 
time was precious. A path furnished a short-cut. 
This had been made by people walking to the church, 
and they had placed stones somewhat irregularly in 
the path to aid them in climbing. Down this steep 
path Putnam urged his horse, greatly to the amaze- 
ment of the British cavalrymen, not one of whom 
dared make such a hazardous descent. They dis- 
charged their guns at him, but he was unharmed. One 
bullet, however, passed through his hat, and he turned 



2o8 New England 

and shook his fist, shouting, "I'll hang ye to the next 
tree when I catch ye!" 

Greenwich is no longer a rustic village, but a place 
of splendid residences, in park-like surroundings. It 
claims to number among its dwellers at least seventy 
miUionnaires. 

A Connecticut hero of the Revolution, whose fame is 
no less permanent than that of Putnam, is Nathan 
Hale. He was born at Coventry in 1755. Although 
a dehcate child he grew up to be fond of outdoor 
life and became a strong, athletic lad. While at- 
tending Yale College he broke the college record for 
jumping. He graduated at nineteen and began teach- 
ing school. When the Revolution began he promptly 
joined the army and soon attained the rank of captain. 

In September, 1776, Washington needed a spy who 
would enter the British lines and learn all he could and 
return with the information. Hale volunteered for this 
duty, and crossed from South Norwalk, Connecticut, 
to Long Island in a sloop, and made his way to New 
York, which the British then held. He was disguised 
as a schoolmaster, and wore a plain brown suit and 
a broad-brimmed round hat, and took along his di- 
ploma. His mission was entirely successful until he 
had returned to the place on Long Island where a 
boat was to meet him. There, at the last moment, he 
was captured and the records of what he had learned as 
a spy were found below movable cork soles in his shoes. 
Soon afterward he was taken early one morning to an 



Connecticut Places and People 209 



orchard on Manhattan Island, a rope was adjusted 
around his neck, and the officer in charge said to him, 
''You may make your last speech." 

With a clear strong voice. Hale responded, "I only 
regret that I have but one hfe to lose for my country." 

Oneof the villages 
not far east from the 
Connecticut River 
in its lower course 
is Moodus, a place 
that is famous for 
its peculiar noises. 
Strange subterra- 
nean sounds have 
been heard in the 
region from time 
immemorial. The 
town's first minister, 
writing in 1729, says 
he had " heard the 
noises coming from 
the north like slow 
thunder, until the 
sound came near, 
and then there 
seemed to be a breaking like the noise of a cannon shot, 
which shakes the houses and all that is in them." 

Perhaps the oddest person who ever dwelt in the 
state was "The Old Leather Man." He was born in 




"The Old Leather Man," who wore 
a suit that was all made of leather 



2IO New England 

France, and as a boy was apprenticed there to a tanner. 
He proved so capable that he at length assumed charge 
of his master's business. About the same time he fell 
in love with his employer's daughter, but her parents 
opposed the match and he came to America. That 
was in i860, when he was about twenty-five years old. 
He avoided people and became a sohtary rover. His 
clothing was all of leather. It was made principally 
of old boot-legs, closely sewed together with leather 
lacing. His shoes had wooden soles and weighed about 
ten pounds. He had shelters or caves to which he 
resorted at various places among the rocks on the lonely 
hills. In them he slept on a bed of leaves with a log 
for a pillow. He had a regular route between the 
Connecticut and Hudson rivers, over which he 
went about once every three months, stopping at 
each shelter several days. W^ien the local people 
saw his fire burning at night on the hills they 
would remark, "The Old Leather Man is around 
again." 

The rustling of his leather suit was likely to be heard 
before he was seen. He would stop at houses where 
he had been treated kindly, and seat himself on the 
doorstep, never uttering a word. If spoken to he would 
look up and smile. WTien food was given to him he 
ate what he wanted and put the rest in a large leather 
pouch that he always carried. In March, 1889, he was 
found dead in one of his shelters. 




A gate decorated with bones from the jaw of a whale 
The Story of Block Island 

BLOCK Island is one of the most popular of the 
New England shore resorts. It is about eight 
miles long and three wide, and is twelve miles from 
the Rhode Island mainland. The island was dis- 
covered in the year 1524 by a French voyager, who 



212 



New England 



says, ''It was well-peopled, for we saw fires all along 
the coast." 

The Indians called it Manisses. It gets its present 
name from Adrian Block, a Dutch navigator, who 
visited it in 1614. 

The native inhabitants were a vigorous race, and 
they engaged in perpetual wars with other tribes. 
One moonlight night the Mohegans of Montauk, 
Long Island, eighteen miles southerly, came in a fleet 
of canoes to assail them. The invaders were dis- 
covered approaching, and after they had landed and 




The Mohegan Bluffs, on ihc -uniniit of which a party of 
besieged Indians perished 

marched up into the island the Manisseans stole their 
canoes. Then the islanders followed the Mohegans 



The Story of Block Island 213 

and drove them to the lofty bluffs on the opposite 
shore. The fugitives could retreat no farther, and 
there on the heights they contrived to dig a trench, in 
which they crouched and defended themselves with 
their arrows. They had no shelter, no food, no water, 
their besiegers were pitiless, and gradually they all 
pined away and perished. "^ 

Another tragedy of the island occurred in the sum- 
mer of 1636. John Oldham of Watertown, Massa- 
chusetts, was trading with a crowd of Indians two miles 
off shore in his pinnace when they suddenly over- 
whelmed and killed him. Two boys and two friendly 
Indians who were with him were made prisoners. 
Afterward they and a part of the vessel's goods were 
put into a canoe, and some of their captors paddled 
away with them toward the shore. 

About this time an English vessel somewhat larger 
than the pinnace arrived in the vicinity, and its com- 
mander. Captain John Gallop of Boston, espied the 
pinnace. The Indians were attempting to navigate 
it, but they managed so unskillfully that Gallop's 
suspicions were aroused. He drew nearer and knew 
it was John Oldham's, and he saw that the deck was 
full of Indians. There were fourteen of them. 

Gallop concluded they had killed Oldham, and he 
wished to attack them, but he had to be cautious about 
doing so, for he and the one man and two boys with 
him had no weapons except two guns and two pistols, 
and only duckshot with which to load these firearms. 



214 New England 

However, they brought their vessel up near the pin- 
nace and fired among the Indians, who stood ready 
for combat armed with guns, pikes, and swords. 

That caused the savages to take refuge under the 
deck. Then Gallop, after drawing off a little way, re- 
turned with a good gale and rammed the pinnace. 
The blow almost overset her, and the Indians were so 
frightened that six of them leaped into the sea and 
were drowned. Again the English drew off. Now 
they fitted their anchor on the front of their vessel 
and rammed a second time. The anchor stove a hole 
in the side of the pinnace, and they delivered another 
volley. 

Four more of the Indians leaped to their death in 
the sea, and the English boarded the damaged vessel. 
One of the remaining Indians surrendered, and they 
bound him and put him in the hold. They captured 
a second and bound him also, but did not dare confine 
him with the first lest the two should contrive to 
release each other. So they heaved him overboard. 
The only Indians still on the pinnace besides the 
prisoner were two, armed with swords, who were in 
a little room below deck. Gallop fastened the door, 
put what goods the Indians had not carried away into 
his vessel, and started for Boston with the pinnace in 
tow. But when night came the wind rose, and he was 
obliged to turn the pinnace adrift, and it was blown 
to the mainland shore. 

The news of Mr. Oldham's death roused Boston to 



The Story of Block Island 2 1 5 

prepare an avenging expedition, and, toward the end 
of September, ninety men set forth for Block Island 
in three pinnaces. On the day that they arrived at 
the island there was too much wind and too heavy a 
surf for them to approach close to the shore, and they 
had to wade waist deep through the water. The 
Indians were on the beach to oppose them, and sent 
their arrows thick about the English. One of the 
soldiers was wounded in the neck. An officer, writing 
of his experiences, says: "Myself received an arrow 
through my coat-sleeve. A second struck my helmet 
on the forehead, so if God in his providence had not 
moved the heart of my wife to persuade me to carry it 
along I had been slain." 

As soon as they got to the land the Indians found 
that the white men's bullets outreached the red men's 
arrows. So the savages fled to the swamps, and the 
English scarcely saw^ them again in the two days that 
the expedition was on the island. The invaders dis- 
covered two villages, and they burned the wigwams, 
killed some Indian dogs that were prowling around, 
and cut down the ripening corn. They brought away 
many well-wrought mats and several handsome bas- 
kets. Two Narragansett chiefs later helped them re- 
cover the boys who had been on Oldham's vessel. 

A few EngKsh families settled on the island in 1662. 
There were then four hundred Indian inhabitants. 
They recognized the power of the whites, and many 
of them became slaves in the settlers' families. Con- 



21 6 New England 

siderable anxiety was felt at times lest they should 
revolt, and when King Philip's War was being fought 
every Block Island Indian was disarmed at sundown. 
The weapons were returned to their owners each morn- 
ing. As the years passed, the Indians steadily de- 
creased in number until, at the end of two centuries, 
there was only a single survivor. 

The first settlers found the island well wooded. 
Now it is almost bare of trees, except for orchards and 
planted shade trees. Its soil is naturally full of small 
rounded boulders left by an ancient glacier, but these 
have been mostly cleared away and made into hun- 
dreds of miles of stone-wall fences. 

The island has one great pond and ninety- nine small 
ones, but springs are entirely lacking, and the largest 
stream is a little brook. 

When the whites had been on the island about 
seventy years, the diminishing supply of wood for 
buildings, fences, and fires made the people fear they 
would have to move elsewhere. Then they began to 
burn peat, and this soon became almost the only 
fuel, except as small supplies of wood were obtained 
from wrecks or brought in boats from the mainland. 
Some of the peat beds cover several acres. 

The peat was called "tug" by the islanders. This 
name refers to the hard work of getting it from the 
bogs, where it exists in the form of thick black mud. 
The mud was shovelled out and loaded on carts. Then 
it was taken to smooth, dry ground and made into 



The Story of Block Island 217 

balls about six inches in diameter with the bare hands. 
The balls were put side by side on the ground, where 
they flattened out a good deal on the under side. After 
drying for two or three weeks they were stacked up 
in pyramids to dry still more, and finally were drawn 
in carts to the tug-house in the home yard. 

Stoves and coal were introduced on the island about 
1845. But thirty years later the poorer families were 
still using peat, and in very few homes had it been 
discarded altogether. Its smoke gave forth a pungent 
odor that plainly informed the passer-by where it was 
being burned. 

At first the island soil was fertile, but after a time 
it became exhausted, and the farmers began to resort 
to the shores for the seaweed that was left there by the 
storms. Men and boys, armed with forks and rakes, 
would often be at the task before a storm was over, 
piUng up the stranded seaweed beyond the reach of the 
waves, and reaching for that in the water lest the re- 
ceding tide or a change of wind should bear it away. 
Some of the seaweed was spread over the fields and 
ploughed under, and some was put into the ground with 
the seed. 

The island people never wholly depended on their 
farms for a livelihood, but spent much time fishing. 
Even the cold stormy winter did not entirely prevent 
the fishermen from venturing forth. 

Not until almost two hundred years after the arrival 
of the first settlers did the people go to any trouble or 



2l8 



New England 



expense in improving the roads. Lanes here and there, 
and cart tracks across the meadows and pastures, 
answered every purpose. The lanes were so narrow 
in places that teams could not pass each other. Some 
of the rustic highways went over hills as steep as house 
roofs, descended into hollows of mud and water, and 
the wheels were almost constantly jolting over boulders. 
There were gates to open and bars to take down, but 
what did it matter? No one was in a hurry. 




Fishing boats in the old ha 



Fine horses and good saddles for both sexes were 
owned, and when there was to be a social gathering of 
young people parties would go galloping around the 



The Story of Block Island 219 

hills and through the ravines, jumping fences and 
leaping ditches, with laughing and shouting, until at 
last they alighted at some house agreed on. There a 
feast awaited them, and a fiddler who helped to make 
the evening a merry one. 

A curious tradition of the island is that of the "Danc- 
ing Mortar." This mortar was a section of a lig- 
num-vitae tree fourteen inches long and ten in di- 
ameter, and hollowed out at one end to contain about 
four quarts. In such mortars the early settlers put 
corn, a handful at a time, and pounded it into meal 
with a stone pestle. The wood was so hard and 
crossgrained as to stand almost any amount of pound- 
ing without being split or worn. Simon Ray owned 
the Dancing Mortar. After he and his family died 
their house was occupied by people of another name, 
and then for a considerable period it was said to be 
haunted. That was when the mortar won its name 
by dancing around the room it was in without any one's 
touching it, and performing all sorts of strange antics. 
It would throw itself on its side and roll to and fro, 
then right itself, and hop up from the floor several times 
in succession. At least, that is the way the story runs. 

The first Block Island hotel was opened in 1842, but 
not until thirty years later did the island really begin 
to develop into the popular resort it has now become. 




The waterside at Wickford 
King Philip and His Narragansett Allies 

NEAR the old Rhode Island town of Bristol is 
Mount Hope, where that most famous of New 
England Indians, King Philip, dwelt, and where he 
met his tragic death. It is a hill rather than a moun- 
tain, and its treeless rounded summit is thinly grassed 



King Philip and His Allies 221 

pasturage. The most flourishing growths there are 
huckleberry bushes, goldenrod, and thistles. The 
mount is at the end of a peninsula, and round about 
are irregular inlets from the sea. King Philip's vil- 
lage was at the foot of a rude crag where there was 
a good spring, and where it was sheltered from the 
rough northwest winds. 

Philip's father, Massasoit, maintained friendship 
with the whites, sold them land, and fed them when 
they were starving ; but as Philip grew older he per- 
ceived the increasing power of the English with alarm. 
They were over running, the whole country. At length 
he determined to act, and he journeyed from tribe to 
tribe inciting them to unite against the white men. 

The struggle began in 1675, and many an exposed 
English village was wiped out, and hundreds of the 
settlers' lives were sacrificed. Late that year the 
greatest battle of the war was fought in the southern 
part of Rhode Island not far from Kingston. There 
nearly two thousand Narragansett Indians, including 
women and children, had taken refuge on a piece of 
rising ground, five or six acres in extent, in the middle 
of a "hideous swamp." They planned to pass the 
winter on this swamp island, and they erected on it 
five hundred bark wigwams, which they lined with 
skins and made bullet proof by piling around the 
inner sides baskets and tubs full of corn and dried 
fish. The tubs were sections of hollow trees cut off 
about the length of a barrel. The Indians fenced in 



222 



New England 



the island with a strong stockade of logs set on end, 
outside of which trees were cut down to form a hedge 
a rod wide. The single door in the palisade was guarded 

by a block- 
house, and near 
by a big fallen 
tree afforded 
passage over 
the encircling 
water. 

An army of 
eleven hundred 
whites from the 
colonies of 
Massachusetts, 
Plymouth, and 
Connecticut, 
and one hun- 
dred and fifty 
friendly In- 
dians, prepared 
to assail this 
stronghold. 
Winter was 
setting in when the expedition started, and the men 
who had to go farthest were nearly a month on the 
way. On the eighteenth of December, when they 
approached the swamp, their provisions were getting 
so low that they decided to attack the next day. 




A lurking Indian 



King Philip and His Allies 223 

Fires were built, and by their light guns were cleaned 
and everything made ready. The troops had no 
tents, and they slept in the open, with no other 
blankets than a "moist fleece of snow." 

They were up at five o'clock the following morning, 
and began the toilsome march by a roundabout route 
to the fort in the swamp. An Indian who had quar- 
relled with his fellows joined them and was enticed by 
the promise of a reward to act as their guide. They 
arrived before the Narragansett stronghold soon after 
noon of the short winter day. The cold was extreme, 
and the air was filled with falling snow. Some of the 
soldiers ran out on the tree trunk which bridged the 
water opposite the entrance, but were swept off by 
the bullets of the Indians' guns. More pressed for- 
ward only to share the same fate. 

But a little party of whites went around to the other 
side of the island and found a way across the partially 
frozen swamp up to the palisades. They climbed on 
each other's shoulders, fought their way over the 
ramparts, and contended with the Indians hand to 
hand inside of the fort. More of the soldiers came to 
their assistance and hacked a breach through the stock- 
ade. 

Meanwhile the assault at the front had been re- 
newed, and presently the entrance was stormed. 
All the Enghsh were soon in the fort, but the Indian 
resistance was stubborn, and the assailants could only 
force the foe back foot by foot. Then the wigwams 



2 24 New England 

were set on fire, and the wind swept the flames through 
the crowded fort. The women and children fled from 
the burning huts and mingled their cries and shrieks 
with the yelling of the warriors. Many were killed 
and many perished in the flames. The rest escaped 
to the woods. 

At the end of three hours the victory of the whites 
was complete, and they started on an eighteen mile 
march in the storm and cold to the little village of 
Wickford. They had lost six captains and over twenty 
men, and there were one hundred and fifty wounded. 
Those of the wounded who were unable to walk were 
carried on litters made of muskets and saplings. For 
the first three miles of their journey they were lighted 
through the woods by the flames of the burning wig- 
wams. It was after midnight when they arrived at 
Wickford, and twenty-two of the wounded had died 
on the march. Some of the party lost their way and 
wandered amid the storm until morning. 

About four hundred of the Indians had been killed, 
including warriors, old men, women, and children. 
Their provisions and shelters had been burned, and 
the survivors faced famine in the middle of the winter. 
The hornets' nest had been destroyed, but most of the 
hornets were still loose, and the plight of the exhausted 
troops was Httle better than that of the foe. Only the 
timely arrival on the very night after the battle of a 
sloop loaded with food supplies from Boston saved 
the little army from terrible suffering. 



King Philip and His Allies 225 



The war continued the next year, and the English 
lost heavily in lives and property. But the Indians' 
loss was far greater, and one by one the confederate 
tribes abandoned PhiUp to his fate. When at last his 
wife and only son were taken prisoners, he exclaimed : 
" My heart 
breaks ! Now 
I am ready to 
die!" 

The son was 
a child of nine. 
The Puritans, 
who owed so 
much to his 
grandfather, 
sold him as a 
slave in Ber- 
muda. 

Summer came, and Philip with a few followers 
wandered back to Mount Hope and encamped near it 
on a knoll in a swamp. There the forces lighting 
Philip surprised and killed him. 

The spot where he met his death has been marked 
with a stone. If you visit it you will find it swamp still, 
and probably its appearance has changed httle with 
the passing centuries. 




On the seaward slope of Mount Hope, 
the home of King PhiUp 




The old stone mill in a Newport park 
A City of Pleasure 

RHODE ISLAND is noteworthy for the number and 
importance of its summer resorts. These include 
Newport, Narragansett Pier, Watch Hill, and Block 
Island. The first is the most famous fashionable re- 
sort in America. It is on an island in Narragansett 
226 



A City of Pleasure 227 

Bay. The Indian name for the island was Aquidneck, 
which means "The Isle of Peace." It is about fifteen 
miles long, but for the most part is very narrow. The 
early settlers called it Rhode Island, probably because 
it was in a bay that furnished good anchorage. The 
word rhode, or r-o-a-d, as it is more correctly spelled, is 
used by sailors to designate just such an anchoring place. 

Aquidneck's first settlers came in 1636 as the result 
of a violent theological dispute in Boston. Mrs. Anne 
Hutchinson, whose teachings were the cause of the 
disturbance, was banished from Massachusetts. She 
and some of her friends and partisans bought the isl- 
and of Aquidneck from the Indians for forty fathoms 
of wampum, twenty hoes, and ten coats. After re- 
siding a few years on the island Mrs. Hutchinson moved 
to the western borders of Connecticut, where the In- 
dians cruelly murdered her with nearly all her children 
and servants — sixteen victims in all. 

Newport first won fame as a slave port — the 
greatest in America. For a long time eighteen hun- 
dred hogsheads of rum were carried annually to Africa 
to be exchanged for negroes, gold-dust, and ivory ; and 
numerous distilleries were operated in the town. The 
wharves were crowded with vessels loading for Guinea. 
Besides rum a ship would take on board pro^dsions, 
muskets, and powder, and an assortment of shackles. 
Presently it would sail, "bound by God's grace for 
the coast of Africa," as the bill of lading would piously 
declare. 



2 28 New England 

After the outward voyage ended there was sometimes 
a good deal of difficulty in securing slaves from the 
native chiefs; and one Newport captain wrote in 
1753, "The trade is so dull it is actually enough to 
drive a man crazy." About one hundred and twenty 
captives made a cargo. They were stowed in a space 
between decks that was three feet and ten inches in 
height. There the women were given their freedom, 
but the men were kept shackled. None of the grown 
persons could stand upright or move about with any 
comfort. 

Slaves were owned for domestic servants by every 
well-to-do Newport family. They had three faihngs: 
they were fond of rum, they would steal, and they 
would run away. Slave labor in New England was 
never a source of much profit. Most of the slaves 
brought across the ocean in the Newport brigan tines 
were sold at Barbadoes, or at Charleston, South 
Carolina. 

At the beginning of the Revolution Newport was 
commercially more important than New York. The 
British took possession of it early in the war. On 
December 7, 1776, eleven square-rigged enemy vessels, 
together with a convoy of seventy transports carry- 
ing six thousand troops, entered Narragansett Bay 
and dropped anchor. The troops established them- 
selves in and around Newport. 

The next summer the Yankees caused a very great 
sensation by capturing the British commander, Gen- 



A City of Pleasure 229 

eral Prescott. He often left his Newport headquarters 
to stay overnight at the home of a loyalist named 
Overing who lived a half dozen miles to the north, 
near the west shore of the island. A regiment of 
Americans was stationed on the mainland at Tiverton, 
east of the upper end of the island, and Major Barton, 
one of its officers, learned from deserters of General 
Prescott's nocturnal visits. He soon contrived a 
scheme for kidnapping the general, and set out on the 
expedition with forty selected men in whaleboats. 

On the night of July 9th, they were at Warwick on 
the west side of the bay, and from there rowed swiftly 
toward their destination. They had to pass a part 
of the British fleet, but were not detected. After 
they landed they tramped a mile to the Overing house, 
and secured the sentinel on guard. Then they forced 
the main door and found Prescott sitting bewildered 
in a lower chamber on the side of his bed. They only 
gave him time to don his breeches, waistcoat, and 
slippers, and marched him off with his aide and the 
sentinel to the boats. He was conveyed safely to 
Providence, where a day or two afterward there ar- 
rived from Newport under a flag of truce his entire 
wardrobe, including his purse, his hair powder, and a 
plentiful supply of perfumery. Congress rewarded 
Barton with promotion and the gift of a sword. 

The British occupied Newport for three years. At 
the time of their exit in October, 1779, their general 
ordered that the shutters of the town buildings be 



230 



New England 



closed, and none of the people was allowed on the streets 
as the troops marched to their ships. 

When the British left, the place was only a shadow 
of its former self. About three hundred houses had 
been destroyed, and the town was in ruins. Groves 
and orchards roundabout had been laid waste, and 
many of the rows of trees which lined the island roads 
had been cut down. 

A Newport letter written in 1822 says, "The wharves 
are deserted, and the people are now so poor that there 




The rocky shore at Newport 



are not more than ten or a dozen families who would 
have the courage to invite a stranger to their table." 
The introduction of railroads made the case of New- 



A City of Pleasure 



231 



port still more hopeless. Other places were better 
situated for modern transportation on the land and 
traffic on the sea, and it had no water power to enable 
it to turn to manufacturing. Many of its people, 
therefore, went elsewhere to seek a livelihood. 




One of the Newport mansions 

But about the middle of the century a wave of 
fashion swept into Newport. The "first families" of 
Virginia and other Southern states came with servants 
and horses in their own schooners from Richmond, 
Charleston, and Savannah to enjoy the summer lux- 
ury of a Northern watering-place. Its attractions were 
a salubrious climate, remarkably mild without extremes 
of heat or cold the year through, wide ocean prospects 
from its cliffs, extensive bathing beaches, and a delight- 
ful historic afterglow. So, though the huge East 



232 New England 

Indiamen and small trim slavers had disappeared, and 
the wharves and slave pens were faUing to decay, 
prosperity revived. 

Since the Civil War Newport has been to a some- 
what predominant degree the resort of New Yorkers 
of wealth and fashion. Their Newport, however, is 
off on the outskirts of the old town and is a settlement 
by itself. There the "big-bugs," as they are some- 
times called by 
the humbler 
islanders, have 
built their man- 
sions on an 
upland that 
juts seaward 
with a long 
ragged front- 
age of cliffs. 
The offlook 
afforded is delightful, and the situation is ideal in its 
breezy summer coolness. A notable attraction of this 
vicinity is the Cliff Walk, which runs for three miles 
along the brow of the bluffs that front the ocean. On 
the landward side are the beautiful grounds and 
magnificent palaces of the summer colony, and in the 
other direction you can toss a pebble into the sea. 

Certain of those who belong to the fashionable New- 
port set go to astonishing extremes in entertaining 
themselves. They like to create a sensation, and it 




The arch on the cliff walk 



A City of Pleasure 



233 



is recorded that in one instance they took a pig out 
to ride in an automobile in order to do something 
really "new." 

The part of 
the place that 
was once so 
flourishing as 
a seaport, is 
now a rather 
quiet and ordi- 
nary old village 
with the nar- 
row streets and 
quaint crowded 
wooden build- 
ings character- 
istic of so many 
of the colonial 
towns along 
the New Eng- 
land coast. 
One of its 
streets which 
impresses the traveller with its name, is Farewell 
Street, so called because it leads to the cemetery. 
There is very little of the old sea traffic now, but 
every evening the place is startled out of its dreams, 
after the curfew has rung, by the arrival of a huge 
Sound steamer, which glides along with a subdued 




In Newport harbor 



234 New England 

noise of parting waters, and, with its multitude of 
electric lights, shines like a street in the New Jerusalem. 
Although the harbor continues to be used by the fish- 
ing fleet, costly yachts often outnumber the fishing 
boats there. 

Newport's most widely famed relic of the past is 
what is known as "The Old Stone Mill" in one of the 
city parks. It is a low circular tower supported on 
eight arches. Formerly there was a floor above the 
arches making a second story to the building. The 
walls stand firm, and probably are much what they were 
in the first place. Little is known with certainty about 
its history except that it was used at one time as a 
storehouse for hay. But most investigators agree that 
it was erected for a windmill by an early governor of 
the colony about 1675. Others, however, claim that 
it was built by the Norsemen hundreds of years before 
Columbus discovered America. 

Longfellow in his well-known poem, "The Skeleton 
in Armor," makes it the home of a bold Norse sailor 
and his bride. This Norseman wooed a "blue-eyed 
maid" in his native land, but she was a "prince's 
child, and he only a Viking wild." When he asked 
to be allowed to marry her, the father's reply was a 
loud laugh of scorn. Soon afterward the two lovers ran 
away and put to sea. They were pursued, and they 
sailed out on the open ocean and continued westward 
for three weeks. Then they came to land, and there 
for his lady's bower the Viking built the stone tower 



A City of Pleasure 235 

"Which to this very hour 
Stands looking seaward." 

But at length the lady died, and he buried her under 
the tower and killed himself by falUng on his spear. 

The skeleton which inspired the poem was unearthed 
in digging down a hill near the neighboring city of Fall 



United States warships in Narragansett Bay 

River. The body had been buried in a sitting posture 
and was enveloped in a covering of coarse bark. With 
the skeleton were an oval breastplate and a belt, both of 
brass, and some brass-tipped arrows in a quiver of 
bark which fell to pieces as soon as it was exposed to 
the air. The romantically inclined fancied the bones 
were those of a Norseman, but more probably they 
were those of an Indian. 




Moonlight at Watch Hill, the popular pleasure resort 
The Smallest State 

RHODE ISLAND is the smallest state in the Union, 
and it is the most thickly populated. There are 
more than five hundred persons to the square mile, 
while Nevada has less than one to the square mile. 
The settlement of the state was begun in 1636 by 
236 



The Smallest State 237 

that famous Puritan preacher, Roger WilHams. He 
had won considerable fame in England before he came 
with his newly wedded wife across the Atlantic to 
Boston, which was just being settled. Soon Salem 
called him to be its minister, but his preaching aroused 
such opposition that he was presently banished from 
the colony. To escape his persecutors he left home at 
night in midwinter and fled alone through the deep 
snow to his Indian friend, Massasoit, with whom he 
stayed until spring. Then he was joined by five of 
his Salem flock, and they made their way to Rhode 
Island, where they started a settlement which Mr. 
Williams called Providence. The name expressed his 
thankfulness for finding there a satisfactory spot to 
establish a new home after his wanderings. 

The liberty of conscience allowed in the colony 
made it a popular refuge, and more and more people 
flocked to it and settled along the shores of Narra- 
gansett Bay. There were fresh water meadows and 
salt marshes that served as pastures for their horses 
and cows, and on which they mowed grass to make a 
winter store of hay. The sheep and swine were turned 
loose in the woods and on the barrens. 

Providence for a long time grew very slowly. In 
1740 it was much as it had been for a half century 
previous — a long, straggling street by the water 
front, where, on summer evenings, the inhabitants 
sat in their doorways, the men smoking their clay 
pipes, and they and all the rest fighting the swarms 



238 



New England 



of mosquitoes that rose from the neighboring 
marshes. 

One of the most noteworthy incidents in the history 
of the city occurred in that time of irritation between 
the colonies and the mother country just before the 
Revolution. In March, 1772, the British schooner 
Gas pee of eight guns took station in Narragansett Bay, 
and began stopping and searching all incoming ves- 
sels to prevent the smuggling of sugar and the evasion 
of paying taxes on it. This went much against the 
grain of the colonists, who were insistent that they 




The Rhode Island State House at Providence 



could not be taxed without their consent. The British 
admiral at Boston assumed that the Rhode Islanders 
were "a set of lawless piratical people," and threatened 



The Smallest State 239 

to hang any of them caught attempting to rescue a 
vessel from the kmg's schooner. 

Early in June a sloop called the Hannah^ on her 
way to Providence, was chased by the Gas pee until the 
latter ran aground a few miles below the city. When 
the Hannah arrived at Providence and reported the 
pUght of the Gaspee, some of the citizens plotted to sur- 
prise the offending vessel. A number of long-boats 
were collected, the oars were muffled, and a party of 
fifty men embarked soon after ten o'clock that night. 
Presently they came in sight of the schooner and ap- 
proached her bows so as to avoid her guns. The 
hail of the single man on watch was disregarded, the 
crew bent to their oars, and in a few seconds the boats 
were alongside. 

Now the heutenant in command of the vessel ap- 
peared on deck. He called all hands, and some pistols 
were fired at the boats. Just as he was in the act of 
slashing with his sword at a number of the attacking 
party who were climbing into the forechains, he fell 
wounded by a musket ball. There was no more re- 
sistance, the crew was set on shore, and the vessel was 
burned to the water's edge. 

Great was the excitement over this event in the 
colonies and in England. Rich rewards were promised 
for the discovery of the perpetrators of the deed, and 
full pardon for any person in the party who would 
betray the rest, but without avail. 

Many a privateer went forth from Narragansett 



240 New England 

Bay to prey on British commerce in the War of 181 2. 
One of these vessels, the Yankee of Bristol, made six 
cruises, captured in all forty prizes, destroyed property 




..- -.^ t^-i»it.„4»j.,-^..-, 




© Kalkhojff Co., N. Y. 

The beach at Narragansett Pier 

to the value of five million dollars, and sent into the 
home port a million dollars' worth of goods. On one 
of the cruises the profits were so great that the two 
negro cabin waiters. Coffee Cockroach and Jack Jib- 
sheet, received for their share about a thousand dollars 
apiece. 

Bristol used to have its whaleships, merchant ships, 
and brigs. Hundreds of men would be busy at the 
wharves loading the vessels or hoisting out the oil and 
hemp and iron, the sugar, coffee, molasses, and other 
imports. Near at hand were coopers making casks for 
the whalemen, and blacksmiths making harpoons and 
chains, and shoemakers making shoes, and tailors mak- 
ing clothing for the sailors. There was a shipyard 



The Smallest State 



24 



where vessels were bemg built, and sail -lofts where 
sails were made, and long sheds in which hemp was 
twisted into ropes. The town still has its shipyard, 
whence have come the noted yachts that have de- 
fended the America's Cup against British challengers. 
Torpedo boats for the naw are also built at Bristol. 




A Bristol wharf 



Near the head of the bay oysters and scallops are 
dredged in the shallow waters, and clams are dug on 
the mud flats. Lobsters are taken in the deeper water 
outside of the bay, and there are little vessels that go 
cruising after fish. Many of the shell-fish and other 
fish are sent by the steamers or trains to the markets 
of Boston and New York. 



242 New England 

In the warmer part of the year great schools of 
menhaden appear in the shoal waters about Long 
Island. These are a small fish, too bony and oily to 
be valued for food, but large numbers are seined and 
taken to the factories at Tiverton where the oil is ex- 
tracted, and the remainder made into fertilizer. 

The sea cuts deeply into Rhode Island and there 
are good harbors near the falls on the streams that 
empty into the upper end of this inreach. A profitable 
commerce early developed at the inland harbors, and 
some of the capital gained was invested in manufac- 
turing at the adjacent falls. The combination of abun- 
dant water-power and a convenient situation for send- 
ing and receiving goods both by water and by land, 
has resulted in developing a manufacturing community 
in the state that for its size is unrivalled in the value 
of its product. This is what has made Providence, 
next to Boston, the largest of New England cities. 

The population of the state is not very evenly dis- 
tributed. Four-fifths of the people live at the head of 
Narragansett Bay and along the rivers that enter it. 
These rivers are neither large nor long, but they 
make a rapid descent from a backlying hill country 
and furnish a great deal of water-power. Manufac- 
turing places are numerous along them, and many 
hundreds of thousands of people dwell in the single 
valley of the Blackstone River. 

The successful manufacture of cotton in America 
dates from 1790, when an Englishman who understood 



The Smallest State 243 

the method of manufacture in his homeland, and who 
had recently come across the Atlantic, interested some 
Rhode Island capitalists, and started a mill at Paw- 
tucket. He superintended the making of new ma- 




Pawtucket mills beside the Blackstone River 

chines, and the firm wdth which he was associated 
had for a dozen years the only successful cotton mill 
in New England. In this same vicinity are now some 
of the largest cotton mills in the world. 

Before the cotton fibre can be spun into thread it 
has to be freed from the clinging black seeds. This 
used to be a very slow process. A negro on one of the 
old-time Southern plantations could work diligently 
all day picking the seeds out, and only have a pound 
of cotton to show for his labor. As a result cotton was 
too expensive to be generally used, and very little 
was cultivated. But when Eli WTiitney invented the 
cotton gin, a great change took place. A modern gin 



244 New England 

can seed fifteen bales in a day, a task which would 
need several thousand men to accomplish in the old 
way. 

After a bale has reached the mill and been torn open, 
the machinery first frees the fibre from all dust and 
dirt and clinging leaves. By means of blowing and 
beating it is made as clean and fair as the driven 
snow. Then great rollers studded with fine wire teeth 
claw at the mass of cotton till the fibres lie smooth and 
straight in a fluffy white rope. This passes through 
other machines, and finally appears as a fine cotton 
thread. The thread is converted into cloth by looms 
run by water-power, steam, or electricity. 

The finished cloth is sent to all parts of the United 
States, and to many distant countries across the 
sea. About half the people of the world wear cotton 
clothes. 

Rhode Island continues to be a leader in cotton 
manufacturing, and among its other important manu- 
factures are woolen goods, machinery, and rubber foot- 
wear. Scores of factories in Providence are devoted 
to making jewelry and silverware, and in this city is 
the greatest screw factory in the world. The place was 
at one time a lumber- shipping port, for there was much 
timber in the region that lay back from the bay and 
streams. This was uninvaded wilderness for many 
years after the settling of the watersides, but now the 
wooded tracts of the uplands and swamps yield little 
except firewood. 



The Smallest State 245 

The highest point in Rhode Island is Durfee Hill, 
which rises 805 feet above the sea level on the north- 
western border of the state. 




In a Rhode Island field near Newport 

Among the leaders in the Revolution the general who, 
next to Washington, did his country the greatest ser- 
vice, was Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. He was 
born in 1742 at Warwick, about ten miles south of 
Providence. His father was a Quaker, who owned 
flour and grist mills, and was a man of wealth for those 
days, but who thought the only education his sons 
needed was to learn to read, write, and cipher. This 
did not satisfy Nathanael, and when he earned money 
he spent it for books from which to acquire knowledge. 
At the age of twenty he began to read law and take 



246 



New England 



an interest in politics, and he helped to organize a body 
of militia in his home region. As soon as the news of 
Lexington and Concord reached Rhode Island, he and 
three others promptly galloped toward Boston to offer 
themselves as soldiers. The colony made him the 

commander of 
its troops, and 
he served with 
distinction all 
through the 
war. 

Twenty miles 
down the shore 
of the bay from 
Warwick, at 
North Kings- 
ton, was born 
in 1756 Gilbert Stuart, one of the greatest of American 
painters. For a good many years he lived in London, 
where he won a notable reputation. When he returned 
in 1793 he painted portraits of Washington and other 
distinguished Americans that in lifelikeness and charm 
of color could hardly be surpassed. 

South Kingston was the birthplace of Oliver Hazard 
Perry, the most picturesque naval hero of the War of 
181 2 and the commander of our fleet in the famous 
Battle of Lake Erie. 




The birthplace of Gilbert Stuart, the 
famous painter 




© Kalthoir Co.. N. Y- 



Birches beside Lake Winnepesaukee 
Early New Hampshire 

NEW HAMPSHIRE and its seaport are indebted 
for their names to Captain John Mason, an Eng- 
lish merchant and shipmaster to whom the region was 
granted by the king in 1629. The name of the colony 
was suggested by that of a county in southern England, 
247 



248 New England 

where Mason lived for years as mayor of the city of 
Portsmouth. 

The first settlements were made in 1623 at Dover, 
a few miles up the Piscataqua, and Rye on the coast. 
A scattered settlement estabUshed somewhat later at 
the mouth of the river received the odd name of Straw- 
berry Bank. Mason sent over implements and arms, 
food and clothing, cattle, and laborers ; and he says, 
in a letter written in 1634, that for his outlay he had 
never received one penny. 

In 1639 there were four primitive little towns in the 
colony. Within the next few years these were taken 
one at a time under the protection of Massachusetts, 
and New Hampshire did not have a separate organi- 
zation again until about 1680. 

For a long time the leading man of the province was 
Richard Waldron of Dover, and he was at length made 
sergeant-major of its military forces. He was largely 
engaged in trading with the Indians, and though a 
thorough Puritan in his religion, cheated them at every 
opportunity. It is said that he did not cross out 
their accounts when they paid him, and that in buying 
beaver skins he would use his fist as a balancing weight 
against the skins put on the opposite side of the scales, 
and claim it weighed a pound. 

After King Philip's War had been in progress a few 
months. Major Waldron gave the master of a vessel 
which was about to visit the Maine coast a warrant 
to seize any Indians he found in those parts. The 



Early New Hampshire 249 

result was that the ship-master invited some of the 
natives on board his vessel and carried them away to 
sell them into slavery. Their tribe was naturally 
much enraged. 

Another charge against Major Waldron was that he 
had gone to some of the Indians when they were at 
peace with the English and taken away their guns, for 
lack of which several of them starved to death. It 
was also asserted that he gave drink to certain Indians, 
and when they were drunk killed them. 




Mount Monadnock 

But what stirred the Indians most was an occurrence 
in September, 1776. Philip was dead, and many 



250 New England 

savages had strayed northward, and, after preying on 
the inhabitants of New Hampshire, took refuge with 
the local Indians who had remained friendly to the 
whites. A Massachusetts force of one hundred and 
thirty English, and forty Indian allies, came up to 
Dover intent on attacking the refugee Indians. But 
Major Waldron contrived a plan for capturing them by 
a ruse. At his invitation four hundred of them gathered 
on the borders of the settlement. The Massachusetts 
troops, and as many New Hampshire men as could be 
collected, met the Indians in an apparently friendly 
way to engage in a sham fight. After going through 
several manoeuvres Major Waldron ordered a grand 
round of musketry. The Indians promptly discharged 
their guns, but the English withheld their fire and 
surrounded and took into custody the entire company 
without bloodshed. Then two hundred of the lately 
hostile Indians were selected from the rest and car- 
ried off to Boston. Several of them were executed 
there, and the others were sold into slavery. 

The local Indians never forgave this treachery. 
Twelve years passed, and then they allied themselves 
with a neighboring tribe for revenge. In the latter 
part of June, 1688, many of them resorted to Dover 
ostensibly to trade. Some of the villagers expressed 
to Waldron fears of an outbreak, but he bade them go 
and plant their pumpkins, and leave him to deal with 
the Indians. 

There were five garrison houses in the village 



Early New Hampshire 



251 



which had grown up near Major Waldron's grist and 
saw mill at the Cocheco Falls. Each was surrounded 
with timber walls, the gates of which as well as the 
house doors were secured with bolts and bars. The 
families in the unprotected houses retired to these 
garrison houses at night, but no watch was kept. It 




An old Dover garrison house that the Indians failed 

to destroy when they burned many neighboring 

buildings in 1688 

was arranged by the Indians that on the evening of the 
twenty-seventh of the month two squaws should ap- 
ply at each of the garrison houses for lodging. Such 
requests were not unusual, and only at one of the 
fortified dwellings was admittance refused. 

When every one had gone to bed and all was quiet, 
the squaw visitors opened the doors and the gates, 
and in rushed the Indian warriors who were waiting 



252 New England 

outside. Major Waldron was awakened by the noise, 
and he hastily pulled on his trousers and seized his 
sword. Though eighty years of age he met the Indians 
at the door of his room, and put them to flight, but as 
he was going back to get other weapons, one of the 
savages stole up behind him and stunned him with the 
blow of a tomahawk. Then they seized him, dragged 
him into his dining-room, put his arm-chair on the 
long table, and bound him in it. Often in the years 
past he had sat at the. table as justice of the peace 
settling the disputes of both the English and the 
Indians. 

"Who shall judge the Indians now?" his captors 
asked. 

After forcing the people in the house to feed them, 
they smote the major with their knives saying with 
each stroke, "I cross out my account !" 

At last they killed him and set fire to the building. 
In all they burned six houses and the mills at the ad- 
jacent falls, and they killed twenty-three persons and 
captured twenty-nine. 

One of the most notable of New Hampshire men 
in colonial times was General John Stark, the hero of 
Bennington. He was born in 1728 at Londonderry, 
where his father was one of the early settlers on what 
was then the New England frontier. Eight years later 
the family moved a few miles north to Manchester. 

They depended in part for their living on hunting 
and trapping, and in the spring of 1752 John and his 



Early New Hampshire 253 

older brother, WiUiam, and two comrades named Stin- 
son and Eastman went in a canoe on an excursion after 
furs to Baker's River in what is now Rumney in the 
central part of the state. Late in April, while John 
was visiting their traps, the Indians surprised and 
captured him. They wanted him to show them where 
his companions were, but he led them in the opposite 
direction. 

Unfortunately his friends became alarmed at his 
absence, for which they did not at first suspect the 
real reason, and they discharged a gun several times as 
a signal. That betrayed them to the savages, who 
turned back and stealthily approached the hunters' 
encampment. The three men had now concluded that 
John had fallen into the hands of the Indians, and 
they were preparing to leave. After the savages had 
secretly observed what the hunters were doing, they 
concealed themselves beside the river below the camp. 
Stinson and WiUiam Stark embarked in the canoe. 
Eastman made his way along the bank, but had not 
gone far when he was taken prisoner by the Indians. 
John shouted a warning to the other two, and they 
paddled for the opposite shore. At once their am- 
bushed enemies fired, killing Stinson, but William got 
away. 

The Indians took their two captives up beyond 
Lake Memphremagog to St. Francis in Canada, the 
dwelhng-place of their tribe. There they presently 
compelled them to run the gantlet. The young 



254 New England 

warriors, each armed with a rod, ranged themselves in 
two lines a few feet apart. The captives were to run 
between these lines from the far end to the council 
house at the other end. Eastman ran first. Every 
savage struck at him as he passed along, and he was 
severely beaten. 

Stark, who was more athletic and adroit, snatched 
a rod from the nearest Indian, and as he ran down the 
lines struck right and left scattering the savages before 
him, and escaped with scarcely a blow. The old 
men of the tribe, who sat a short distance away looking 
on, greatly enjoyed the confusion of their young war- 
riors. 

One day Stark was ordered to hoe corn. He well 
knew that the Indians regarded such labor fit only for 
squaws and slaves, and he took care to cut up the corn, 
and spare the weeds, in order to give them the idea 
that he lacked skill in unmanly labor. When this 
experiment did not attain his object, he threw his hoe 
into the near-by river and told them plainly that it 
was not the business of a warrior to hoe corn. His 
spirited action gained him the title of ''Young Chief," 
and he was adopted into the tribe. 

Not long afterward he and Eastman were redeemed, 
and they returned to their homes after an absence of 
four months. Stark always recalled with pleasure this 
captivity, and said that he received more genuine kind- 
ness from the Indians than he ever knew prisoners of 
war to receive from any civilized nation. He often 



Early New Hampshire 



^S5 



fought them later in the service of his state, and he 
did his part vahantly in various battles of the Revolu- 
tion, beginning with Bunker Hill. He died at the age 
of ninety-four at his home in Manchester, and hes 
buried there on rising ground 
that overlooks the Merrimac. 

New Hampshire's leading 
educational institution is 
Dartmouth College in Hano- 
ver on the Connecticut River. 
It originated in a plan of 
Rev. Eleazar Wheelock of 
Lebanon, Connecticut, for 
educating Indian youths to 
be missionaries. He thought 
that such missionaries would 
succeed among their fellows 
better than would the whites, 
and he began his labor with 
two Indian lads at his home 
in Lebanon in 1754. The 

number of pupils increased until eight years later he 
had more than twenty under his care. 

To aid the work contributions were solicited in various 
parts of this country, and also in England, where the 
money collected was put into the hands of a board of 
trustees headed by the Earl of Dartmouth. Presently, 
when Mr. Wheelock at the request of the governor of 
New Hampshire, removed to Hanover to establish a 




One of the allractive old 
doorways for which Ports- 
mouth is famous 



256 New England 

college there, he gave it the name of the English 
earl. 

Mr. Wheelock set out for his new home in August, 
1770, and his family and pupils soon followed. The 
pupils numbered twenty-four, only six of whom were 
Indians; for his plan of making Indian missionaries 
had not succeeded as well as he expected. Of forty 
Indian youths whom he had educated, half had re- 
turned to savage life. 

The clergyman's family made the northward journey 
in a coach, and the pupils walked. As they went on, 
the roads became so bad they could hardly get along. 
But at last they reached their destination. There, 
amid a forest of lofty pines on an extensive plain, a 
few acres of the trees had been felled, and their trunks 
and boughs covered the ground in all directions. Two 
or three small log huts had been built, but these were 
not enough to shelter all the newcomers, and many of 
them had to sleep several nights on the ground with 
pine boughs for beds, and sheltered from the dews and 
rains by a few boards raised over them on poles. 

At the first commencement held in August, 1771, the 
stage was an outdoor platform of rough-hewn boards 
to which access was afforded by an inclined hemlock 
plank. The governor of the colony was present with 
a retinue of forty fine gentlemen from Portsmouth, 
and an ox was roasted whole on the Green and served 
to the populace at the governor's expense. 



The Flume 
The White Mountains 

THE Appalachian mountain system, which forms 
the eastern rim of the great Mississippi basin, ex- 
tends from Alabama northward through New England 
and on into Canada. There are many ranges in this 
system, for the most part running parallel with each 

S 257 



258 New England 

other, and between the mountain ranges are rivers 
flowing through valleys that are sometimes narrow, 
and sometimes many miles broad. The highest peaks 
are in North Carolina, but Mount Washington in the 
WTiite Mountains of New Hampshire is a close rival. 

This New Hampshire mountain group includes no 
less than twenty bold peaks, and abounds in wild val- 
leys, deep gorges, lakes, and cascades. The Indians 
held the White Mountains in much reverence, and 
believed them to be the abode of the Great Spirit. 
They afhrmed that no one who scaled the sacred heights 
returned alive, but this did not prevent the first Eu- 
ropean who wandered into the region in 1642 from climb- 
ing Mount Washington. He found many crystals, and 
for a long time the mountains were called the " Crystal 
Hills." The present name refers to the snow which 
whitens the bare higher summits for so much of the 
year. 

The first settler among the mountains was a hunter 
who established himself there in 1792. About ten 
years later a small tavern was built, but there were 
no hotels for another half century. After that the 
region rapidly developed as a summer resort and be- 
came known as "The Switzerland of America." An- 
other descriptive title is "The Roof of New England." 

Scattered through the mountains are big palatial 
hotels, and towns and villages almost wholly devoted 
to caring for warm-weather visitors. One of these 
villages is Bethlehem, which is higher up and has more 



The White Mountains 259 

hotels than any other village in New England. At the 
beginning of the nineteenth century it consisted of a 
few scattered log cabins, and the settlers' fields were 
full of dead girdled trees. It Hes on a breezy upland 
slope with a vast panorama of mountain ranges rim- 
ming most of the horizon. The permanent inhabitants 
are only about one thousand, but the summer popu- 
lation is a multitude. 

The railroads approach the mountains from differ- 
ent directions, and one passes right through the midst 




Franconia Notch 

of the group by way of a deep valley called the Craw- 
ford Notch. A strange catastrophe occurred in this 
notch in 1826. An occasional life has been lost in 



26o 



New England 



winter storms, and there have been some serious acci- 
dents to travellers on the roads, but no other tragedy 




Beside the stream in Pinkham Notch 



has the interest of this one in the heart of the Crawford 
Notch. A rustic inn had been built there, and in it 
dwelt Mr. and Mrs. Willey, their five children, and two 
hired men. At dusk, one day toward the end of August, 
a storm burst on the mountains and raged with great 
fury through the night. Every tiny stream became a 
torrent, and the valleys were flooded, and the roads 
were impassable. 
Two days later a traveller succeeded in getting to 



The White Mountains 261 

the Willey House, which he found standing in woful 
desolation. An avalanche of earth, rocks, and trees 
had descended from the mountain and barely missed 
carrying the house away. When the traveller pushed 
open the door a dog disputed his entrance and howled 
mournfully. The lonely cabin had no other inmates. 
Beside the beds lay the clothing of the members of the 
household, indicating a hasty and frightened flight. 
Apparently they had become aware of the danger that 
threatened and run forth seeking safety only to be 
overwhelmed. If they had remained in the house, they 
would not have been harmed, for the avalanche divided 
a little back of the dwelling and rushed by on either 
side, leaving the frail structure standing, though some 
of the debris struck it with sufficient force to move it 
slightly from its foundations. A flock of sheep that 
was in the yard in front of the house suffered no harm, 
but the barn was crushed and two horses in it were 
killed. 

The bodies of all the members of the household ex- 
cept those of three of the children were found later. 
For twenty-one miles down the valley the turnpike 
was demolished, and more than a score of bridges were 
swept away. Some of the meadows were buried sev- 
eral feet deep with earth and rocks, and there were 
great barricades of trees that had been torn up by the 
roots. 

Thousands of people visit the top of Mount Wash- 
ington every year. This monarch of the New Eng- 



262 New England 

land mountains is over one mile high. As you go up it 
the trees steadily diminish in size, and at the height of 
three thousand feet they are not half as large as those 
in the valley. At four thousand feet they are mere 
shrubs, scraggly, stunted, and gray with age and shaggy 



Mount Washington, the loftiest height in New England 

moss. At last, even these pinched earth-hugging 
birches and spruces find the soil too thin and the war- 
fare with the elements too strenuous, and there is 
nought but a drear waste of shattered, lichened rocks, 
with intervals of coarse grass, moss, diminutive blue- 
berry bushes, and a few dainty blossoms. The rock 
fragments in this blighted upper region look as if they 
had lain there unchanged for ages. 



The White Mountains 263 

There is a good road and a bridle-path to the sum- 
mit, but the chmb is long and hard, and most people 
prefer to ride up on a queer little railway. The rail- 
way is in part laid at the surface of the ground, and 
in part on trestle-work which often passes over deep 
hollows. There are cogwheels under the engine which 
fit a heavy cogged rail that is halfway between the 
other two. This enables the train to ascend and de- 
scend safely the steepest parts of the mountain. The 
machinery is so made that no matter what happens to 
it the train can be brought to a prompt stop, and not 
run away down the mountain. The railway is three 
miles long. When its inventor applied to the legis- 
lature for a charter, the scheme seemed so impossible 
that a member sarcastically moved to give the appli- 
cant leave to build a railway to the moon. It was 
completed in 1869. 

A bridle-path was cut to the top in 1819, and the 
next year some gentlemen stayed on the summit 
overnight and named the different peaks of what has 
since been known as the Presidential Range. The 
names are those of the early presidents, Washington, 
Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson. 

More and more visitors came to the mountains, and 
in 1853 a house was erected on the summit of Mount 
Washington. All the buildings there have to be made 
secure by anchoring with numerous cables and rods. 
They could not otherwise withstand the fierce gales, 
for on this bleak height the wind has registered the 



264 New England 

amazing velocity of one hundred and eighty miles an 
hour. 

Clouds are apt to hover about the summit, and on 
the journey up or down you are likely to pass through 




The Presidential Range, so called because its peaks bear the 
names of six early Presidents of the United States 

their gray mists. The view from the top is very wide- 
reaching on a clear day, and Mount Katahdin in Maine 
can be seen off on the northeastern horizon one hun- 
dred and fifty miles away. 

Every three hundred feet above the sea level brings 
the temperature down about one degree, which means 
a difference of twenty degrees in the case of the sum- 
mit of Mount Washington. The air there is nearly 
always cool, and in winter the mercury has been known 
to go down to fifty degrees below zero. 



The White Mountains 



265 



Aside from the mountains themselves and their wild 
notches there are several attractions, such as Echo 
Lake, the Old Man of the Mountain, and the Flume, 
which every visitor wishes to see. 

Echo Lake in the Franconia Notch is a dainty body 
of water with steep wooded heights rising from its bor- 
ders. If you stand on the shore opposite the bluffs, 
your voice or the report of a pistol or the notes of a 
bugle come back with starthng clearness on a quiet day. 




Only a mile away is Profile Lake, from which the 
woods sweep up a precipitous slope for more than a 



266 



New England 



thousand feet, and you see near the summit the grim 
stone features of the Old Man outjutting from a tre- 
mendous cUff. The face itself is forty feet in length, 
but the beholder does not realize its great size at 

such a distance, 
and marvels 
most that it is 
so strikingly 
human. The 
Indians were 
its original dis- 
coverers, and 
you wonder 
what impres- 
sion was made 
on them by 
that strange 
face gazing 
forth from the 
brow of the 
wilderness 
mountain. 

The Flume is an almost straight cleft nine hundred 
feet long and sixty or more deep. Its perpendicular 
walls are only a few feet apart, and a little stream 
rushes down the shadowy depths with much noise and 
turmoil. The stream enters the upper end of the 
Flume by a leap from the brow of a precipice in a 
graceful cascade. 




The Old Man of the Mountain 



The White Mountains 



267 



Formerly there was an enormous suspended boulder 
in the Flume, so firmly wedged between the cliffs that 




A campiii,L: 



it seemed destined to stay there until doomsday. But 
in 1883 a violent thunderstorm started a landslide up 
beyond the cleft, and all the rubbish came down 
through and carried along the boulder. The mass of 
rocks and earth and trees was deposited some distance 
below. Whether the boulder was broken into frag- 
ments, or whether it hes buried entire in the debris, 
no one knows. 

There are lookout places on the mountains where 
men are watching for fires all the summer through. 
The men have telescopes, and their lookouts are con- 
nected with the villages by telephone. As soon as they 



268 



New England 



see the smoke of a fire starting they telephone down, 
and men are soon on the spot putting it out. 

Soon after the beginning of the present century 
"Old Man Thompson," a famous White Mountain 
hunter, died at the age of ninety-five. He came to the 
mountains in his youth when some of the people were 




)KalkhoJfCo..N. 

Morning mists at Dixville Notch 



still hving in log houses. About 1870 he killed the 
last wolf ever seen in the region. A man had drawn a 
dead ox out in his pasture, and Old Man Thompson 
saw the wolf eating the ox. He set a trap, and caught 
the creature. He hunted foxes, coons, mink, and 
marten for their furs. Occasionally he would get an 
otter, and he secured many a deer and bear. 

Bears are shot and trapped in the mountains even 



The White Mountains 269 

yet. The trapper finds two old logs about three feet 
apart. Then he puts lighter logs on top to make a 
kind of fence, and fastens them in place with stakes 
and wire. He closes one end of the passage, puts some 
scraps of meat or fish inside at the closed end, and in 
front of this bait sets a great jagged- jawed steel trap. 
The trap is not hitched. If it were, and a bear got into 
it, he would jerk his foot out at his first jump. The 
trap itself weighs thirty pounds, and has a stout chain 
five feet long hitched to it, and on the end of that is 
a three-clawed grapple which drags along and catches 
on roots and bushes. The bear is not likely to go very 
far before the grapple compels him to stop, and there 
the trapper finds him. 

Bears usually keep away from villages and farms; 
and, as they do most of their roving at night, people 
seldom see them. In the winter they stay in some 
snug hiding-place asleep, and do not come out until 
the snow melts off. They are usually fat then, but food 
is scarce and they become very lean long before the 
berries are ripe in the summer. Meanwhile they eat 
roots, and dig up wild turnips, and they tear rotten 
logs and stumps to pieces to get at the big ants which 
are inside. If they can make their way into a bee 
tree, they steal the honey, and they are always on the 
lookout for yellow wasp nests. In the fall the bears 
paw over the leaves after beech-nuts. They climb apple 
trees to get the fruit, and often damage them badly pull- 
ing in the ends of the limbs and clawing off the apples. 




Falls at North Woodstock 
New Hampshire Places and Famous People 

THOUSANDS of farmers in New England add to 
their income by taking boarders who come from 
the cities, when the summer heat and dust are most 
trying, to find rest and recreation amid the country 
greenery. It is a grateful change to people who spend 
270 



New Hampshire Places and People 271 

most of the year in offices, stores, and manufactories. 
They resort in multitudes to New England's wooded 
mountains and silvery lakes, its winding rivers with 
their falls and rapids, its pleasant valleys, and its 
rocky seacoast. Some sta}^ for only a few days, but 
others remain for weeks or months. 

It is estimated that the summer people leave over 
five milhon dollars a year in the single state of New 
Hampshire. Much of this is spent in the White 
Mountains, but there are many other favorite resorts 




niepesaukee 



in the state, especially on the shores of the beautiful 
lakes, such as Sunapee and Winnepesaukee. These 



272 New England 

names were bestowed by the Indians. The latter 
means "The Smiles of the Great Spirit." Winne- 
pesaukee is a very irregular lake with a breadth of from 
one to twelve miles and a length of twenty. It has 
three hundred and sixty islands, some only a few 
square yards in extent, and others having an area of 
many acres. 

Large numbers of people are attracted to the beaches 
of the state's short shore-line, or to the famous Isles of 
Shoals, which are among the most frequented of all 
the New England islands. Lowell describes them as 

" A heap of bare and splintery crags. 
Tumbled about by lightning and frost. 
With rifts and chasms, and storm-bleached jags, 
That wait and growl for a ship to be lost." 

They are about three leagues off the New Hampshire 
coast. The largest of the nine islands is a mile in 
length and half a mile across. On one of them enough 
ground free from boulders is found for a few acres 
of mowing, and on another for some garden plots. 
They are wholly treeless, and support nothing of 
larger growth than huckleberry and bayberry bushes, 
woodbines, and wild roses. 

The isles were frequently visited by European fishing 
boats long before New England was settled, and people 
began to establish their homes on them almost as soon as 
on the neighboring mainland. There was a rapid in- 
crease of population and wealth, and the isles had their 



New Hampshire Places and People 273 

meeting-house and court-house, and a seminary of such 
repute that gentlemen's sons came from the mainland 
to it for literary instruction. Swine were numerous, 
and what is now called Appledore was then known as 
Hog Island. There was a tavern on Smutty Nose. 
Hog Island had a good spring of water on it, and a 
considerable village grew up on its sheltered southerly 
slope. 

Trade, commerce, and fishing were actively engaged 
in, and the little harbor was filled with shallops and 
pinnaces. The scene presented at the isles then must 
have been a picturesque one. On windless summer 
days the great hulking red-capped fishermen lounged 
about the rocks smoking their Brazil tobacco and wait- 
ing for a breeze, the fishwives chattered at their out- 
door net-mending, and the ragged children played 
boisterous games in the narrow village lanes. By the 
shores were many long platforms spread with the dry- 
ing fish, and wisps of smoke drifted upward from cot- 
tage chimneys. Roundabout was the wide sea, glisten- 
ing in the sunlight, and westward were the dim blue 
hills of the mainland. 

When the wind began to blow, the men sailed away 
in their little vessels, but with the approach of twilight 
the fishing boats, one by one, came winging home. 

By 1 700 the isles began to lose their population and 
prosperity, and of late years they have not had a single 
permanent family on them except that of the light- 
house keeper. But their healthfulness and the equable 



274 New England 

coolness of their summer climate bring to them a 
swarm of vacation visitors every year. 

One of the most charming and unusual of New 
Hampshire towns is Cornish on the banks of the 




Boat landing, Lake Sunapee 

Connecticut. It is a place of wonderful estates that 
have been developed by a colony of artists, authors, 
and other professional men. The first man of fame to 
come was Augustus St. Gaudens, the greatest of Ameri- 
can sculptors. He remodelled an old tavern into a 
beautiful dwelling. Later comers in some instances 
also made over local houses bought of the country folk, 
and in other instances they built new homes of mar- 
vellous architectural attractiveness, and they sur- 
rounded their residences with all the enchantment that 



New Hampshire Places and People 275 

landscape-gardening and unspoiled woodland per- 
mitted. Their homes are widely scattered about the 
neighborhood of Blow-me-down Brook in a tumbled 
region of steep hills and deep valleys, with the giant 
form of Mount Ascutney looming skyward not far 
away to the south. It is a secluded spot several miles 
distant from the nearest railroad station, which is 
at Windsor across the river. 

Formerly Portsmouth, at the outlet of the Piscataqua, 
was the largest place in New Hampshire, but it has 
failed to keep pace with the manufacturing cities which 




A Portsmouth waterside 

use water-power. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the poet, was 
born in Portsmouth, and it was there he had the youth- 
ful experiences that he relates in his delightful "Story 
of a Bad Boy." The simple old house in which he 
lived has been preserved as a memorial. 



276 



New England 




against 
, rocks, 



Another famous man of remarkable originality who 
started life in New Hampshire was the editor, Horace 
Gree]ey. He was born in 181 1 in a humble farm-house 
at Amherst a few miles north of Nashua. His mother 
was strong and active. She did both housework and 
fieldwork. She hoed in the garden, could outrake any 
man in town, and could load hay as fast and as well as 
her husband. The farmers had to contend 

hills 

sand, marshes, 
and long win- 
ters. It gave 
a stranger a 
new idea of 
hard work to 
see an ox-team 
ploughing the 
sides of those 
steep stony 
hills. The little boy driver leaped along from sod to 
sod, the man wrenched the plough around the rocks, 
and boy and man every now and then united in a yell 
for the panting beasts to stop when the plough was 
caught by a hidden rock too large for it to overturn. 
Yet the town yielded fair returns of rye, oats, potatoes, 
corn, and young men. It was the last that formed the 
chief article of export. 

Horace's name was commonly shortened to "Hod" 
in his boyhood. He learned to read about as soon as 



Birthplace of Horace Greeley 



New Hampshire Places and People 277 

he learned to talk, and at the age of four could read 
any book in whatever position it might be placed — 
right side up, upside down, or sidewise. To gain 




Mount Chocorua 

knowledge was his delight in school or wherever he 
was. Even when hoeing corn or chopping at the 
woodpile, if he had a companion, he was perpetually 
talking about his lessons, asking questions, and nar- 
rating what he had read. 

But of all New Hampshire's sons the greatest repu- 
tation was won by Daniel Webster, who was born in 
1782 at the little town of Salisbury about twenty miles 



2/8 



New England 



north of Concord. He was the ninth in a family of 
ten children. There were five boys, and it was natu- 
rally expected that they would work on the farm, but 
Daniel was the youngest and weakest of them, and 
was not required to do very much. So he had plenty 
of time for reading, fishing, and roaming about. 

At a very early age he was 
able to read with such fluency 
and charm that the neighbors 
would often stop at the farm- 
house and ask "Webster's boy" 
to read to them. His selections 
were always from the Bible, and 
he read with a dramatic power 
that held his hearers spellbound. 
To prepare for college he went 
to Exeter Academy. He trav- 
elled thither, a distance of fifty 
miles, ''riding double" behind 
his father in clothes that he had outgrown, and with 
rustic manners which caused him much mortification 
at the school. He graduated at Dartmouth in 1801, 
and soon began to practise law in the rural courts. 
Within a few years he moved to Portsmouth, the 
chief commercial place in the state. He was success- 
ful there as a lawyer and a politician, but at the end 
of ten years, when he left it to make his home in 
Boston, his unpaid debts amounted to thousands of 
dollars. 




Daniel Webster 



New Hampshire Places and People 279 

In a short time he was recognized as one of Boston's 
leading lawyers, and was making twenty thousand 
dollars a year. Yet he had a spendthrift habit which 
resulted in his seldom being free from an oppressive 
burden of debt his life through. He had few rivals in 
public debate and oratory, and his unusual appearance 
made him a marked man wherever he appeared. 

New Hampshire soil, except in the alluvial valleys, 
is better adapted to pasturage than culture, and the 
upland farm towns have only a few hundred inhabit- 
ants in each. Between 1850 and 1900 the amount of 
improved land decreased one half, showing that a very 
large amount formerly cultivated had gone back to 
pasturage and woodland. However, the state has its 
fertile sections, where many fme dairy farms are found. 

The three largest cities are on the Merrimack. Of 
these Concord owes its growth in part to being the 
state capital, but the growth of the other two, Man- 
chester and Nashua, can be credited almost wholly to 
their manufacturing. 

One of the best-known products of Concord is wagons. 
Here, too, are important granite quarries, but New 
Hampshire gets its title of the "Granite State," not 
from the amount of that stone quarried, but from the 
amount that exists within its boundaries. Some of its 
mountains, such as Mount Washington, consist al- 
most entirely of granite. 

Mica is another product of the state, and in Grafton 
County are the leading mica mines of the United States. 



2«0 



New England 



Cotton goods and shoes each contributes about one- 
fourth of the total value of New Hampshire's manu- 
factured products. At Manchester is the largest cotton 



1 


•K<."ij^-rA>w4<\^HBB 




^ 

H 


tfg 


m 


i 


^! 




°wg^^g^ 


m 


^^^^3Si 






» r^s 


^ 


^^^w- 


'j^2g9|^^^H|^^H 



Aino.^kra,^ Fall> ai Mancheslei 



mill in the world. It gets power from the Amoskeag 
Falls, which have a drop of fifty-five feet. The falls 
have an Indian name which means fishing-place. This 
was a great resort of the savages, and the fisheries here 
were of important value to the early settlers. The 
shad passing up the falls in the spring are said to 
have been so numerous that a man could not put 
his hand into the water without touching some of 
them. 



New Hampshire Places and People 281 

Many mills have been built on the tributaries of 
the larger streams, and the railways have either pre- 
ceded or followed them, for valleys are the natural 
thoroughfares for the railways. As a consequence the 
most populous villages are in these valleys. Some of 
the early mill villages grew up in situations that the 
railroads could not profitably reach, and in that case 
both the mills and the villages have usually been 




Livermore Falls on the Merrimack Ri 



abandoned. Economical transportation is just as 
necessary for profitable manufacturing as cheap 
power. 







Lake Memphremagog 
Early Vermont and the Green Mountain Boys 

IN the colonial wars the predatory parties which 
moved back and forth between Canada and the 
frontier settlements of New England followed the water- 
ways. These were navigable almost to their sources by 
the light birch canoes of the Indians; and in winter, 
282 



Early Vermont 283 

when they were frozen, they still offered the routes 
of easiest grade for snowshoes and sledges. At night 
the northern war parties camped with no shelter but 
the sky and the lofty arches of the forest, and as they 
travelled they depended for food largely on the fish 
they could catch, and the deer and other creatures 
they could shoot. 

The route oftenest used was by way of Lake 
Champlain, and up Otter Creek, then down White 
River and the Connecticut. This was commonly 
known as "The Indian Road," and for nearly the 
whole distance it was on the borders of or in 
Vermont. 

The raids from Canada led to the establishment of 
Vermont's first settlement. Fort Dummer, in the 
southern part of what is now Brattleboro. Work was 
begun on the fort in February, 1724. The task was 
undertaken by Massachusetts, and the fort was named 
in honor of its lieutenant-governor. By early sum- 
mer it was ready for occupancy. It was built of hewn 
logs laid horizontally to form a square one hundred 
and eighty feet on a side, and there was an outer de- 
fence consisting of a stockade of square timber twelve 
feet in length set upright in the ground. Habitations 
for the garrison were built against the walls in the inner 
enclosure. The fort was furnished with four pieces of 
hght ordnance that, if the need arose, could be charged 
with old nails or stones. There was also a "Great 
Gun," used only as a signal. Its sudden thunder 



284 



New England 



rolling through leagues of forest summoned aid or 
announced good tidings. 

The fort had a garrison of forty English and friendly 
Indians. Some of them would climb the neighboring 
mountains and spend long winter nights on the sum- 
mits looking in the morning and evening for smoke 
from enemy campfires. Others went scouting in the 
wilderness that lay to the northward to discover any 
raiding parties that might be coming toward the fron- 
tier towns. These rangers were mainly directed by 
Captain Josiah Kellogg, who at the age of fourteen 




The Connecticut Riser and Mount Ascutney 

had been captured by the Indians and carried off to 
Canada. There he lived the life of a savage among 



Early Vermont 285 

his captors for ten years. He acquired their skill in 
hunting and trapping, and learned to speak their 
language. After his return to civilization he was of 
great value as interpreter in dealing with the Indians, 
and until he died in 1757 was constantly employed in 
public service on the frontiers. 

Only a few months after the fort's completion it 
was attacked by the Indians, and four or five of its 
occupants were killed or wounded. A trading house 
was presently established at the fort, and the Indians 
flocked to it with their moose-skins and other furs. 

Several blockhouses were built at points farther up 
the river. These were of hewn logs with a projecting 
upper story, and loopholes through which muskets 
could be fired. 

As soon as the Enghsh came into possession of 
Canada in 1759 and the invasions ceased, settlers be- 
gan to drift into the southern part of Vermont and 
up the Connecticut Valley. In a short time Benning- 
ton had its hamlet in which the principal building was 
the Green Mountain Tavern, with a stuffed catamount 
for a sign. Brattleboro boasted the only store in the 
province, Westminster had a courthouse and jail, and 
at Vergennes on Otter Creek, where the beavers had 
scarcely quit building their dams, were a mill and 
half a dozen cabins. 

Vermont's early settlers were very largely from 
Connecticut, and when it became a state in 1777 
it assumed the name of New Connecticut, but 



286 



New England 



this was dropped for its present name a few months 
later. 

Within a short time after the inflow of settlers had 
begun, New York and New Hampshire both laid claim 
to the whole region, and there ensued much hostility 
between these colonies. Both made grants of land 
in the disputed territory, and when surveyors under- 




Summer work on a Vermont farm 



took to run the Hues of the New York grants across 
lands already granted by New Hampshire, they were 
compelled to desist. Sheriffs were resisted, and some- 
times tied to trees and "severely chastised with twigs 
of the wilderness" by the settlers, who organized under 
Ethan Allen of Bennington and adopted the name of 
Green Mountain Boys. 
Allen was from Connecticut, where he was born at 



Early Vermont 



287 



Litchfield in 1737. He was a stalwart, rough-man- 
nered backwoodsman, brave, and rudely eloquent, and 




Picturesque falls at Boltonville 

a natural leader of men. When the New Yorkers 
made settlements on the western borders of the prov- 
ince, he and his Green Mountain Boys drove them 
away and burned their log-houses. These contests 
continued for many years. 

Soon after the battle of Lexington the leading men 
of Vermont met at Bennington in the Catamount 
Tavern and ''attempted to explore futurity." They 
were considering the possibiHty of capturing Fort 



288 New England 

Ticonderoga near the southern end of Lake Champlain 
on the west side when word came from Connecticut 
that men were being recruited both there and in 
Massachusetts to help in such an enterprise. Then 
the conference promptly decided to act, and Ethan 
Allen was made commander of the expedition. 

Agents were sent to Albany to secure provisions, 
guards were posted on the roads to prevent information 
of the patriots' plans reaching the British, and thirty 
men went to the lake to secure boats. The boats were 
to be taken to Shoreham, which was opposite the fort 
on the Vermont side of the water, and there the troops 
were to assemble. 

A messenger was sent from Bennington to Rutland, 
sixty miles distant, to rally the Green Mountain Boys. 
He made the journey on foot in twenty-four hours 
along the wretched roads of the new country, and over 
rough by-paths only marked by blazed trees. He visited 
several hamlets and summoned their fighting men, and 
here and there spoke with an isolated settler, who at 
once left his chopping or his planting to take his gun. 

Meanwhile a spy in the guise of a simple backwoods- 
man went to the fort and gained admission on the pre- 
text that he wanted to get shaved. After taking note 
of all that could be seen in the place, he returned to his 
friends. 

On the evening of the ninth of May, the force had 
come together at a little cove about two miles north of 
Ticonderoga, which was out of sight across the lake. 



Early Vermont 289 

There were sixteen men from Connecticut, forty from 
Massachusetts, and nearly one hundred and fifty Green 
Mountain Boys. They waited anxiously for the 
boats which were to come from the southern tip of the 
lake. These did not arrive until nearly morning. 
They included scows, skiffs, dugouts, and yawls, but 
not enough to transport half the force. Allen and 
eighty others embarked and soon had crossed to the 
other shore. The boats returned for the rest of the 
men, but day was now at hand, and Allen decided to 
move forward without further delay. He was com- 
pletely successful, and the great stronghold with all 
its cannon and miUtary supplies fell into the hands of 
the Americans and cost them not a single life. 

Two years later, Burgoyne's army made its way 
down from Canada and retook Ticonderoga. When 
he reached the southern end of the lake in midsummer 
the settlers of western Vermont were panic-stricken. 
They feared that the Indian alUes of the expedition 
would be turned loose on them, and all the farms in 
the exposed district were deserted. The main high- 
ways leading southward were crowded with horsemen 
and footmen, and with lumbering vehicles carrying 
women, children, and household goods, and with 
straying flocks and herds. Mudholes and streams 
that had to be forded, added to the difficulties of the 
flight. 

A call was sent out for the Vermont militia to as- 
semble; General Stark brought troops from New 



290 New England 

Hampshire, and other troops came from western 
Massachusetts. 

Provisions were becoming scarce in Burgoyne's army, 
and he determined to seize for his use the stores which 
the Americans had collected at Bennington. To ac- 
comphsh this he despatched a Hessian officer, Colonel 
Baum, with a force of three hundred unmounted 
dragoons, who were to provide themselves with horses 
on the foray, one hundred Indians, and four hundred 
other troops. Lieutenant Colonel Breyman with six 
hundred more men was ready to support Baum if 
needed. 

The latter approached Bennington on August fif- 
teenth, but encountered the Americans in such force 
that he halted his troops in a commanding position on 
a hill and had them prepare to defend themselves there. 

That night rain began falling and increased to a 
downpour. It continued to fall heavily from a leaden 
sky all the next day, but in spite of the drenching rain 
Baum kept his men busy with axes and spades extend- 
ing and strengthening their defences. 

On the following morning the sun rose clear, and the 
raindrops glittered on forest and meadows, corn-fields, 
and ripening wheat, and fihny vapors rose from the 
pools and swollen streams. The Americans began 
early in the day to assault the British position from dif- 
ferent sides, and as Stark led a charge he shouted to 
his men, "Those redcoats are ours to-day, or Molly 
Stark is a widow !" 



Early Vermont 291 

Few of the Yankee farmers wore uniforms. Most 
of them fought in their shirtsleeves, for the weather 
was intensely hot, and they wore no badge but a corn- 
husk or a green twig in the hatband. So vigorous was 
their onset that the Indians stole away in affright, glad 
to escape with their own scalps and without plunder. 




Bennington battlefield 

For two hours the roar of conflict was, as Stark said, 
"like a continuous clap of thunder," The enemy had 
two small cannon, but presently the cannoneers were 
shot down, the guns taken, and the Yankees swarmed 
over the breastworks. Few of the British escaped 
death or capture. 

About this time Brevman, who had been delaved 



292 New England 

by the rain and the wretched condition of the roads, 
arrived. A part of the Americans had gone to the 
town with the prisoners, and the rest were scat- 
tered over the blood-stained field in quest of spoil. 
For a little while it looked as if they might be over- 
whelmed. The small force that at first was able to 
oppose the enemy gradually fell back until the militia 
rallied in sufficient strength to make a stand. A 
warmly contested engagement continued until after 
sunset, and then Breyman hastily retreated. Stark 
pursued him till it was impossible to aim a gun or dis- 
tinguish friend from foe in the gathering gloom. 

Breyman escaped with less than one hundred men. 
The American loss in killed and wounded during the 
day was seventy. Two of the cannon captured from 
the Hessians in this battle are to be seen in the State 
House at Montpelier. 

Ethan Allen took no part in the Bennington fight. 
He had fallen into the hands of the British the same 
year that he captured Ticonderoga, while engaged in 
an expedition that invaded Canada. For three years 
he was held a prisoner, most of the time in England. 
Then he was brought back and exchanged. On his 
arrival at Bennington the people thronged into the 
hamlet to greet their old leader, and though powder 
was scarce and precious a cannon was charged, and it 
thundered forth a salute of thirteen guns for the United 
States, and one for Vermont. In his last years Allen 
Uved at BurUngton, where he died in 1789. 




A Lake Champlain ferry-boat 
Lake Champlain 

LAKE Champlain was discovered in 1609 by the 
great French explorer whose name it bears. He 
came thither from the little settlement of Quebec, 
which he had started the year previous. His main 
object was to find a way to China. A war party of the 
293 



294 New England 

Canadian Indians went with him, and he had agreed 
to help them in attacking their enemies, the Iroquois. 
They went up the Richelieu River and entered the 
lake about the middle of the summer in twenty-four 
canoes. There were two other Frenchmen besides 
Champlain, and sixty warriors. Some of the Indians 
spent a part of each day on shore hunting in order to 
supply the expedition with food. To be sure, they had 
a provision of parched maize pounded into meal, but 
they saved this for use when they should be so close 
to the enemy that hunting would be impossible. Late 





Sunset near Colchester Point 

in the day the party would land, draw up their canoes, 
and range them closely side by side. Rude, bark- 
covered sheds were then made, dry wood was gathered 



Lake Champlain 295 

for the fires, and trees were felled with which to form 
a defensive barricade on the landward side of the 
canoes and shelters. 

Champlain went on amid the islands and broad 
reaches of water to the more open portion whence he 
could see the forested ridges of the Green Mountains 
far off in the east, while on the western horizon loomed 
the Adirondacks. At the southern end of the lake 
the expedition encountered a party of Iroquois, and 
fought them victoriously. That satisfied Champlain's 
allies, and the party paddled back to Canada. 

The Indians' name for the Lake meant "The Gate 
of the Country," and this very well described it in the 
days when waterways were the chief thoroughfares. 
Canoes could go from it to the St. Lawrence, or south- 
erly to either the Hudson or the Connecticut, with only 
short portages. The lake is one hundred and twenty- 
six miles long. It varies greatly in width. There are 
parts so narrow you can almost toss a stone across 
them, but opposite Burhngton is a stretch of water 
fully ten miles broad. 

In the early years of the nineteenth century many 
of the great pines that grew in Vermont's virgin forests 
were felled, and made into rafts that voyaged north- 
ward on the lake and down the Richeheu River to the 
St. Lawrence. The rafts were impelled by both sail 
and sweep. The crew lived on board, and when the 
south wind filled the sails and wafted their ponderous 
craft past the ever-changing shores the voyage was very 



296 



New England 



pleasant. But calms or adverse winds meant hard 
work with the heavy sweeps, and sometimes a storm 




Looking across the lake from Burlington, 
are the Adirondacks 



In the distance 



was encountered which threatened to break the raft 
in pieces. White-winged sloops, schooners, and square- 
sailed scows plied to and fro carrying to Canada 
cargoes of wheat and potash, and bringing back salt 
and merchandise from beyond the sea. 

When winter converted the lake into a plain of ice 
it afforded a highway for traffic on runners, and many 
were the sled loads of produce that were taken to Mon- 
treal to exchange for goods. 



Lake Champlain 



297 



There was a time when smugglers engaged in their 
unlawful traffic on the lake. They sailed by night in 
armed bands of such strength that the revenue officers 
seldom ventured to molest them. One notorious 
smuggling vessel was called the Black Snake. This was 
finally seized by a party of militia where she had crept 




The Winooski Gorge 

up the Winooski a few miles with a cargo of contra- 
band goods. A lieutenant and twelve soldiers were de- 
tailed to take her to the lake. While doing so they were 
ambushed by the smugglers, who fired repeatedly from 
the willow-screened bank and killed three of them. 
The remainder of the militia hurried to the rescue and 
captured eight of the smugglers. Two more were 



298 New England 

taken later. When these men were tried, one was 
sentenced to death, three to ten years' imprisonment, 
after first standing in the pillory, and two were to re- 
ceive fifty lashes each. 

The lake continued to be dotted with schooners and 
sloops until after 1875. Since then the railroads have 
taken to themselves nearly all of this traffic. 

Here and there on the long narrow lake is a ferry. 
Most of the ferry-boats are propelled by steam, but 
formerly they were flat-bottomed scows that had a 
mast and sail. When there was no wind, the craft 
had to be coaxed along with oars or by poling. 

The ice makes an excellent bridge all through the 
winter, and at that time the lake is often used as a 
race-course for horse trots. In the spring, when the 
ice begins to melt, people continue to venture on it, 
and they do not always stop soon enough. Teams 
break through, and occasionally horses are drowned. 

The most important lake port is Vermont's largest 
city, Burlington. In the early days the goods re- 
ceived here by steamers and by canal boats and other 
craft from the Hudson and St. Lawrence valleys were 
sent to the towns farther east in great eight-horse 
wagons. But now railroads pass up the adjacent river 
valleys and go over the divide to the valley of the 
Connecticut. 

Lumber is no longer sent north to the St. Lawrence, 
for Vermont was shorn of its choicest timber many 
years ago, and the immense forests of Canada have 



Lake Champlain 



299 



become its chief source of supply. A vast amount of 
lumber reaches Lake Champlain from the Canadian 
waterways, and Burlington is one of the leading lumber 
markets of the country. 

In this part of the lake occurred some lively naval 
fighting in the War of 181 2. Once during that war the 





The Winooski Valley with Camel's Hump in the distance 

islet Rock Dundee near BurHngton was mistaken by 
the British for a United States vessel and was peppered 
with shot. 

The first steamer used on the lake was launched at 
Burlington in 1808, only a year after Fulton's suc- 
cessful experiment on the Hudson. This vessel as- 



300 New England 

tonished the spectators by its wonderful performance 
as it churned its way through the waters at the rate of 
five miles an hour. The steamers now on the lake offer 
a most agreeable way of journeying up and down it and 




Bow Arrow Point between North Hero and South Hero islands 

getting acquainted with its scenic charms. It is noted 
both for its superb views and its rare historic associa- 
tions, and has long been a favorite summer resort. 

One of the famous old-time dwellers in the vicinity 
of Lake Champlain was Horace Greeley, who later 
became a renowned figure in the literary and political 
world of his day. It was in 1821, when he was not 
quite ten years old, that his father moved from New 
Hampshire to West Haven near the southern tip of 
the lake. The home of the Greeleys was three miles 
from its borders, and the lake was not in sight, 
but they could see the morning mists that rose from 
its surface, and the hills that formed its opposite shore. 
They were poor, and a staple article of food with 
them was bean porridge. 



Lake Champlain 301 

Horace had a passion for books, and in the evening 
he spent much of his time reading by the hght of the 
pine-knots blazing on the hearth. Candles were a 
luxury too expensive to be indulged in. The neighbors 
attributed his continual reading to laziness, and proph- 
esied that he would not prosper. 

But he was never idle, and he found various ways 
to earn money. He gathered nuts and sold them. 
He would hack away hours at a time at a pitch-pine 
stump, tie up the pieces in bundles, and carry them to 
the store, where they could be sold for kindling wood. 
He went bee-hunting and got honey to sell. In one 
way or another he always contrived to have a little 
money, and he spent most of it for books. 

When he was fifteen he went to East Poultney, about 
a dozen miles away, and became an apprentice of the 
publisher of a country newspaper and began to set 
type. He was an extremely gawky-looking youth, 
tall and slender, with very light tow hair. At first 
the other apprentices threw type at him, made saucy 
remarks to him, and on the third day took one of 
the large balls that were used to ink the type and made 
four dabs on his hair. But he went on with his work as 
if nothing had happened. After that the boys aban- 
doned their pranks, and he and they soon became good 
friends. He worked at his type-setting barefooted, 
and with his shirtsleeves tucked up above his elbows. 

There was a lyceum in the place which had won such 
a fame as to often attract to its meetings people from 



302 



New England 



a distance of ten miles. It assembled weekly at the 
little brick schoolhouse. The great feature of the 
evening was a debate on subjects like: "Is novel- 
reading injurious to society? Is marriage conducive 
to happiness ? Is the Union likely to be perpetuated ? 
Was Napoleon Bonaparte a 
great man?" 

Horace was a leading mem- 
ber of the lyceum during the 
four years he lived in the 
town, and as a debater was 
unexcelled in the range and 
accuracy of his knowledge 
and in the clear and lively 
presentation of his arguments. 
Fairfield, a few miles east 
of Lake Champlain near St. 
Albans, was the birthplace of 
Chester A. Arthur. He 
graduated from college at the age of eighteen, and 
three years later, in 1851, became the principal of the 
academy at North Pownal in the southwestern corner 
of the state. It is an odd fact that James A. Gar- 
field, whom Arthur succeeded as President of the United 
States, taught a writing school in the same building 
not long afterward. He had become a student at Wil- 
liams College in the fall of 1854, and at the end of the 
first term earned money by teaching writing in the two 
months' winter vacation. 




Horace Greeley, the 
journalist 




An earthenware dasher churn of long ago 
Vermont Fndustries 

THE most important industry of the " Green Moun- 
tain State " is agriculture. Many of the largest and 
best farms are on the broad lowlands which border 
Lake Champlain from Canada to the Hudson Valley. 
Abundant crops of hay and grain are raised, and apples 



304 



New England 



and other fruits are largely grown. The situation is 
particularly favorable for fruit because the prevailing 
westerly winds from over the lake tend to prevent 
early frosts. 

Formerly many sheep were kept and much wool 
was sold from the farms. The flocks have decreased 
four-fifths, but the Merino sheep kept at present pro- 
duce a fleece 
that weighs 
three times as 
much as that 
which was 
sheared from 
the old-time 
sheep. 

The cattle, 
too, have been 
greatly im- 
proved. Cows 
have been im- 
ported from parts of Europe where they have long 
been carefully bred, and the improvement has been 
continued here so as to secure animals that will turn 
their food into the largest possible amount of rich 
milk. In no other state is so high an average yield 
of butter secured from the cows as in Vermont. They 
can be pastured to advantage on the rougher farm 
land, while hay, corn, and other crops can be raised 
on the better land. 




Vermont Industries 305 

Much of the butter is made at creameries. One of 
the greatest of New England creameries is at St. 
Albans. There are times when it makes more than 
ten tons of butter in a day. The milk for the butter 
is gathered from six hundred dairies and carried to 
various centrally located separators. At these the milk 
is poured into the separating machine which whirls 
it very rapidly. The watery part is heavier than the 
cream, and crowds to the outside and is drawn off 
through a tube while the cream passes off in another 
tube. This process does not deprive the milk of all 
its food value, and the creamless milk is taken home 
by the farmers for their pigs and calves. 

The cream is sent to St. Albans, where it is put into 
a big churn, and by means of machinery is shaken and 
beaten till the particles of fat are parted from the 
buttermilk. Next the butter is transferred to a ma- 
chine which washes it, then presses out most of the 
water and mixes it evenly with salt to flavor it. After 
that it is molded into prints or packed in wooden tubs. 

The butter of the state was in good repute even in 
the primitive days of the earthen milk-pan and slow 
laborious dasher churn, and when a summer store of ice 
was a luxury a farmer never dreamed of possessing. 
Then the good, bad, and indifferent butter of a whole 
township went as barter to the village store, where, 
with little assorting, it was packed in firkins. Later 
it was sent to the city markets on wagons or boats in 
the summer, and on sleighs in the winter, along with 



306 New England 

cheese, pork, apples, maple sugar, and other products 
of farm and forest. 

Perhaps no manufactured butter or cheese quite 
equals the home-made at its best, but the average 
quaHty of the latter is low, and the price it will bring 
is similarly low. The person who buys creamery but- 
ter or factory cheese in a store is reasonably certain 
that it has been made by improved processes and 
machinery under expert care, and that it has high 
excellence. There are about two hundred creameries 
and seventy cheese factories in the state, and upright 
dasher churns and wooden cheese presses are no longer 
common on the farms. 

One product in which Vermont is preeminent is 
maple sugar. It produces more than half of what is 
made in the United States. The source of the sugar 
is the sap of the rock maple trees. In the spring, as 
soon as there is a thaw to set the sap moving in the 
trees, the gathering begins. The season usually lasts 
from early March through April. One, two, or three 
holes are bored near the base of each rock maple that 
is of sufficient size in the tract of woodland which is to 
be covered in the operations, and small metal spouts 
are driven into them. The sap starts to flow almost 
instantly if the weather is mild. A pail is hung on 
each spout to catch the sweet dripping liquid, and the 
pail has a cover to keep out rain-water and dirt. It 
is large enough to contain all of one day's flow. 

One or two men with a span of horses hitched to a 



Vermont Industries 



307 



sled, on which is a barrel or a tank, go about among the 
trees to gather the sap and draw it to the sugar-house. 
There it is boiled in a big pan set over a fire on arches 
of brick or stone. When the sap has been over the fire 
until the water in it has nearly all passed away in steam. 




A sugar-house on the borders of a grove of rock maples 

it is strained and then rapidly boiled until it becomes 
sugar. This final process, however, is often omitted, 
and much of the maple sweet is sold in the form of 
syrup instead of sugar. 

At the beginning of the sugar season the snow is 
still deep in the woods, and walking is difficult unless 
there is a stifT crust. The larger sugar places have two 



3o8 



New England 



or three thousand trees on them. If there are only a 
few hundred trees, the sap gathering may be done by a 
man who goes about on snowshoes with a yoke on his 
shoulders, from either end of which is suspended a 
large pail. The sap will not flow freely unless the 
nights are frosty and the days warm. In such weather 
the supply of sap is sometimes so copious that the men 
have to work day and night to prevent loss. 

Years ago the sap spouts were made of wood. Often 
they were of elder or sumach, which have a pithy 



f III 




^WI10 



Gathering 



^ 



;ap 



heart that can be pushed out. The sap was caught 
in troughs roughly hewn out of blocks of wood, or in 



Vermont Industries 309 

dishes made of birch bark. Later clumsy wooden 
buckets that were larger at the bottom than at the 
top were used. The gathering was done with oxen. 
When the sap was taken to the sugar camp, it was 
boiled in the open air in enormous kettles hung over 
a fire built on the ground. The fire was opposite an 
open-fronted shanty that sheltered the sugar makers 
from the weather during their daily and nightly labor. 

The sugaring-off in the old cauldron was greatly 
enjoyed by the children. With a spoon or a wooden 
paddle they would dip up some of the thick warm 
syrup and spread it to cool on the nearest clean snow. 
Its gummy sweetness, when it was eaten, was more 
delightful than any candy they could buy in the shops. 

Many old-time families saw no sweetening from one 
end of the year to the other but maple sugar and 
syrup, and the honey from their few hives, or the 
uncertain spoil of the bee hunter. 

Little remains in Vermont of the fine forests of the 
pioneer period. Yet in the northeastern countries 
lumbering is a leading occupation even now. There 
is considerable timber also in the rugged ranges of the 
Green Mountains, which extend the entire length of 
the state. The loftiest height in Vermont is Mount 
Mansfield, about twenty miles northwest of Mont- 
pelier. It has an altitude of 4364 feet. 

In St. Johnsbury is a great twelve-acre factory de- 
voted to the making of scales. It is the largest factory 
in its line in the world. Over one hundred varieties 



3IO New England 

of scales are made. The smallest will weigh a letter, 
and the largest will weigh a loaded railroad car. These 
Vermont scales are the standard in many countries. 

Another widely known manufacture of the Green 
Mountain State is that of organs for homes and for 
churches and other pubHc buildings, at Brattleboro. 
In the vicinity of this town the famous English author, 
Rudyard Kipling, abode for a time, and there wrote 




Mount Mansiield from Smuggler's Cove 

"Captains Courageous," a story of the Gloucester 

fishermen which ranks among the best of boys' books. 

One noteworthy source of wealth in Vermont is its 

quarries. Limestone is gotten out for building pur- 



Vermont Industries 3 1 1 

poses and also to be burned for lime. Granite of 
different colors and textures is quarried at various 
places, and in and about Barre this industry employs 
many thousands of workers. 

Some of the most important of American slate quar- 
ries are in Vermont. Slate is a stone that can easily 




A Barre granite quarry 



be split into thin layers with smooth surfaces. It is 
largely used for roofing, and the pieces after splitting 
need scarcely any preparation except trimming to make 
them ready for laying. The stone is so compact and 
hard that it resists the weather very effectively. Slate 



312 



New England 



for school blackboards is polished by rubbing it with 

sand, pumice stone, and water. 

Marble began to be quarried in the state soon after 

the Revolution, and over half the marble used in the 

country since 
that time has 
come from Ver- 
mont. It is a 
comparatively 
soft and fragile 
stone and has 
to be handled 
with a good deal 
of care. The 
marble is used 
for building 
purposes and 
for statues and 
monuments. 
The Greeks 
used marble for 
some of their 
most famous 
buildings and 
statues. 
The great quarries of West Rutland were first worked 

in 1836. Before that the site of the quarries had been 

a barren sheep pasture, shaggy with stunted evergreens. 

The wealth this pasture roofed was undreamed of, and 




Lake Willoughby 



Vermont Industries 



313 



the whole tract was so cheaply valued that it was once 
exchanged for an old horse worth less than a single one 




ihs of ;i Rutland marble quarry 



of the huge blocks of marble that day after day are 
hoisted from the c^uarry depths. In the early years 
the growth of the business was slow, for there were no 
railroads in the region, and all the marble had to be 
drawn by teams twenty-five miles to Whitehall on 
Lake Champlain, the nearest shipping point. 

Besides, there was doubt as to the durabihty of the 
stone. But now long exposure to our variable and 
destructive weather has proved it to excel any foreign 



314 New England 

marble in this quality. Since 1852, when a line of rail- 
road that passed near was completed, the marble 
business of Rutland has increased rapidly. The quar- 
ries are on level ground, and the excavation has gone to 
a depth of over one hundred feet. Machines on mov- 
able railways cut grooves and drill series of holes in 
the marble floor, and mark off the stone into blocks. 
These blocks are separated from the rest of the mass 
by the use of iron wedges, for blasting would injure the 
stone. 

Most of the marble is taken out in oblong blocks that 
have a length of ten or fifteen feet, and a width and 
thickness of from three to five feet. To cut the rough 
blocks into such shapes and sizes as buyers desire, be- 
fore sending the marble away, saws are used which 
consist simply of long smooth strips of steel. Very 
hard sand borne by a little stream of water is con- 
tinually supphed under the machine-moved saws as 
they sway backward and forward. The sand rubs 
against the marble and does the cutting at the rate of 
about two and a half inches an hour. Sand and water 
are also used for polishing. 

Marble is usually nearly white, but differs a good 
deal in delicate shades and markings. In the north- 
western part of the state beautiful variegated and black 
marbles are quarried. They are much harder than the 
Rutland marble, and it costs more to shape and polish 
them. 

There is very little level land in Vermont, and among 



Vermont Industries 315 

the towns of the state are scarcely any which do not 
contain some mountain or lofty hill from which a de- 
lightful view can be obtained. The mountains are 
nearly all clothed with verdure from base to summit, 




Newbury beside the Connecticut 

and the name of the state, derived from two French 
words, Verd Mont, which mean Green Mountain, is 
very appropriate. 

The state abounds in lakes, ponds, and httle rivers, 
and is one of the most attractive of the nation's summer 
playgrounds. 




The Sheepscot River, a little east of the Kennebec 
Historic Maine 

AN early English visitor to the Maine coast was 
Captain Weymouth, who landed about the first 
of June, 1605, halfway between the Penobscot and 
Kennebec rivers, and explored the neighboring streams, 
harbors, and islands. The Indians brought many 
316 



Historic Maine 317 

furs to the English ship to exchange for trinkets. One 
day they took several of the crew who were on shore 
to where other Indians sat around some fires laughing 
and talking, while puffs of smoke rose from their 
mouths. Probably the sailors had never seen any 
one smoking before. Deerskins were spread for the 
white men to sit on, and a pipe, the bowl of which was 
made of a lobster's claw, was passed to them. They 
sucked the smoke into their mouths as they saw the 
natives doing, and called the operation "drinking 
tobacco." 

When Captain Weymouth was nearly ready to sail 
away he had three Indians, who came to the vessel, 
seized and thrust below deck. Several sailors rowed 
ashore and caught two more savages. It was as much 
as they could do to grip the nearly naked Indians and 
get them into the boat. They had to drag them on 
board by their topknots. The captives were taken as 
slaves to England, but Captain Weymouth felt that 
he was conferring a benefit on them because they 
would be taught his language and religion. 

Two years later, toward the end of August, an Eng- 
lish colony arrived from their homeland in two vessels, 
and started a colony on the peninsula west of the 
Kennebec where the river joins the sea. The ships 
returned to England, and the settlers busied themselves 
building houses and a Kttle vessel. By the time winter 
set in with its sleet and snow, they had finished a fort, 
a storehouse, one large dwelling, and a number of small 



New England 



ones. But the storehouse burned with all their pro- 
visions and the furs they had bought from the Indians. 
They were obliged to live on fish and such game as they 
could shoot, and on dog meat. Their cabins could not 
keep out the searching winds and biting frost. Many 
of them were sick, and their leader, George Popham, 

died. In the 
spring a ship 
came with sup- 
plies, but the 
settlers de- 
clared it was 
of no use for 
Englishmen to 
try to live in 
such a cold 
country, and 
they all either 
returned to England, or went in the little vessel they 
had built to Jamestown, Virginia. 

For some time afterward only fishermen pitched 
their tents or built their huts along the rocky Maine 
coast. 

In 1 614 the famous Captain John Smith with two 
ships and forty-five men visited the region. He and 
his fellows built seven boats in the vicinity of the 
Kennebec, and used them in part for fishing, and in 
part for exploring with the hope of discovering gold 
and copper mines. No mines were found, but Smith 




The Southern Cross on the Maine coast 



Historic Maine 319 

was presently able to sail to England in one of his ships 
with a valuable cargo of fish and furs. The master of 
the other ship tarried behind and prowled along the 
coast as far as Cape Cod, capturing natives at several 
places. Finally, he crossed the ocean with twenty- 
seven of them whom he sold as slaves in Spain. 

Maine's first permanent settlement was made in 
1624 by emigrants from Plymouth Colony at what is 
now York, but which they gave the local Indian name 
of Agamenticus. 

A few years later Sir Ferdinando Gorges was made 
proprietary lord of the country between the Piscataqua 
and Kennebec rivers, and as far north as Lake Um- 
bagog. The region was given the name of Maine in 
honor of the English queen, who came from France, 
where her estate was the province of Mayne. 

The settlements were increasing in number, and Gor- 
ges, who directed the affairs of the colony from his 
English home, foresaw a rich reward. He selected the 
plantation of Agamenticus for his capital, and presently 
made it a city, naming it for himself, Gorgeana. It 
comprised twenty-one square miles. The city had a 
mayor, aldermen, and councilmen, and there were 
policemen, each of whom carried a white rod. Yet 
Gorgeana never had as many as three hundred in- 
habitants, and at the end of ten years became the 
town of York. 

In 1652 Massachusetts laid claim to Maine as far 
as Casco Bay, and administered this region as a county 



320 New England 

with the name of Yorkshire. The heirs of Sir Fer- 
dinando Gorges continued to have a claim on the 
country, but after it had been devastated by King 
Philip's War they sold all their rights to Massachusetts. 
From the time of the Revolution until 1820 Massa- 
chusetts governed the territory under the name of 
the District of Maine. Then it became a separate 
state. 

One of its notable men in the colonial period was 
William Phipps. He was born at Woolwich near the 
mouth of the Sheepscot River a few miles east of the 
Kennebec, in 1650. His parents had twenty-six 
children, twenty-one of whom were boys. When he 
was about sixteen years of age his father died, leaving 
little else than a small farm for the support of his 
numerous family. Wilham was presently apprenticed 
to a ship's carpenter for four years. As soon as his 
term of service expired he went to Boston and worked 
at his trade and learned to read and write. A year or 
two later he married and returned to his old home on 
the Sheepscot River, where he made a business of 
building vessels. 

After a time he heard that a Spanish ship laden 
with treasure had sunk near the Bahama Islands. 
Shortly afterward he made a voyage to England and 
interested the Duke of Albemarle in the treasure ship. 
The duke furnished a vessel, and Phipps sailed to the 
Bahamas. He encountered serious difficulties, but in 
the end found the wreck lying in forty or fifty feet of 



Historic Maine 



321 



water. From it he obtained thirty-four tons of silver, 
besides gold, pearls, and jewels, worth in all $1,350,000. 
His share of this amounted to seventy thousand dol- 
lars. For the fair manner in which he treated the crew, 
and the honest division he made of the spoil, the king 
knighted him, and the Duke and Duchess of Albemarle 
sent his wife a gold cup worth four thousand dollars 
as a mark of their esteem. He was appointed high 
sheriff of New England, and later governor of the 
colony of Massachusetts. 

By 1675 Maine had thirteen settlements, and these 
contained five or six thousand inhabitants. Their 





\K(dihoffCo.,N. Y. 

Block house at Fort Kent, a relic of the days 
of Indian warfare 



vessels bore away ample freights of lumber from the 
mills, furs from the trading houses on the rivers, and 



322 New England 

fish from the sea. The fields yielded abundantly, and 
thriving herds of cattle were in the woody pastures. 

Then came the Indian wars, and for nearly a cen- 
tury the settlers were in constant terror of savage 
raiders. The trouble began in the summer of 1676 
when King Philip and his warriors were being hunted 
down. Many of the Indians from the defeated tribes 
fled and mingled with the red men of Maine. One of 
these refugees, known as "Simon, the Yankee-killer," 
visited the home of Anthony Brackett at Back Cove 
in what is now Portland. On the ninth of August 
the Indians killed a cow of Mr. Brackett's, and he 
complained to Simon. 

"I can bring to you the fellows who killed the ani- 
mal," Simon declared. 

He went off and two days later returned with a party 
of savages. "These are the Indians who killed your 
cow," he said to Mr. Brackett. 

Then they seized and bound the entire family, con- 
sisting of Mr. and Mrs. Brackett, their five children, 
and a negro man-servant. Afterward they went to 
neighboring homes, killed or captured thirty-four per- 
sons, and set the buildings on fire. The Brackett 
family continued in captivity until November, at 
which time their captors came, in their wanderings, to 
the north side of Casco Bay. Mrs. Brackett found an 
old birch canoe on the beach. She repaired it, and the 
family and the negro man secretly got into it and 
paddled across the bay to Black Point. A vessel 



Historic Maine 323 

bound for the Piscataqua chanced to be there, and on 
it they made good their escape. 

The Indians engaged in forays all along the coast. 
They even had an ambitious scheme to capture the 
white men's fishing vessels and sail down the coast 
in them to burn Boston. In July, 1676, they re- 
sorted to the islands that the fishermen frequented in 
Casco Bay, and prowled along the shores spying out 
their prey. One dark night they noiselessly embarked 
in their fight canoes, boarded the motionless vessels 
lying at anchor, and killed or captured their sleep- 
ing crews. Thus they secured about twenty vessels, 
each of which had had a crew of from three to six 
men. 

When news of this reached Boston, a large ship was 
sent to the scene, well supplied with cannon and 
small arms, and manned by forty sailors and soldiers. 
It was expected that the ship would encounter the 
captured fleet in the hands of the Indians, and that 
there would be a battle. But she found the vessels, 
one here, one there, some aground and some beating 
against the rocks. They were too large to be pro- 
pelled with paddles, and the Indians could not navi- 
gate them. The sails had veered and flapped about, 
and the vessels had gone in every direction except the 
one the dusky mariners wanted to go. So the Indians 
soon abandoned their prizes in fright and disgust. 

During King Philip's War more than half of the Maine 
settlements were laid waste, and nearly three hundred 



324 New England 

of the inhabitants were killed, or carried into captivity 
from which they never returned. 

Of all the combats in Maine between the whites 
and Indians the best known is "Lovewell's Fight." 
This has been celebrated both in prose and in ballads. 
In the middle of April, 1725, Captain Lovewell with 
forty-six volunteers started from Dunstable, Massa- 
chusetts, to hunt Indians about the headwaters of the 
Saco. They did this partly because the Indians were 
a menace to the settlements, and partly in hope of 
profit, for a liberal bounty had been promised for 
every Indian scalp. 

One of the party returned on account of lameness. 
Later, another was disabled by reason of an old wound, 
and he, with a kinsman to help him, went back to the 
settlements. 

By the time the force reached Ossipee Pond in New 
Hampshire the serious illness of one of their number 
caused them all to halt, and they built there a small 
stockade fort. There they left the sick man with a 
surgeon and eight of the most weary of the party. 
The rest continued their march toward what is now 
known as Lovewell's Pond in Fryeburg, Maine, twenty- 
two miles distant. On the night of Friday, May sev- 
enth, they encamped by a brook that enters the pond 
at the northwest corner. Only two miles farther on 
was Pigwacket, the principal village of the Indians of 
that region. 

The next morning, while the adventurers were at 



Historic Maine 325 

prayers, the report of a gun was heard. They went 
along north of the pond in the direction whence the 
sound came, and had arrived on a level plain when 
they saw an Indian standing on a point that thrust 
out into the pond on the east side. The men left their 
packs among the ferns and moved cautiously forward. 




of a remnant of the once powerful Penobscot tribe 

In a short time they met the Indian returning toward 
the village, and fired and killed him. 

Meanwhile, a party of Indians led by Paugus, the 
chief of the tribe, found the packs which had been 
left on the plain. They counted them and found 
that their own force was three times as strong as that 
of the English. It was now about ten o'clock. Love- 
well and his men started to go back the way they had 



326 New England 

come. They had passed over a stream, since known as 
Battle Brook, and were crossing the plain when the 
savages came rushing toward them from front and 
rear yelling like demons. The English responded with 
determined shouts, and fired a volley that made the 
Indians withdraw somewhat. 

But the savages soon pressed near again, and some of 
the combatants were not more than twice the length 
of their guns apart when they fired. Captain Love- 
well was mortally wounded, but he leaned against a 
tree and kept on shooting even after he was too far 
gone to speak. When eight had been slain besides the 
captain, the party fell back to the pond. On their 
right was Battle Brook, on the left a rocky point, and 
in front they were partially protected by a deep bog 
and a belt of tall pines. There the Indians beset them 
for the rest of the day. 

Some of the guns became foul with so much firing, 
and John Chamberlain went down to the brook to 
wash his out. While he was doing this he observed a 
huge Indian not far away engaged in the same task, 
and the Indian saw him. Both finished the washing 
in all haste and began loading at the same instant. 

"Me kill you now !" the Indian shouted. 

"Maybe not," Chamberlain responded. 

They fired, and Chamberlain's bullet crashed 
through his foe's brain. The Indian's bullet whistled 
harmlessly up in the air. 

Just before dark the savages retired, and about 



Historic Maine 327 

midnight the moon rose. Then the Enghsh began a 
retreat. Two of the mortally wounded had to be left. 
Only nine were uninjured, and they were without food, 
for their packs had been captured. One man, ex- 
hausted by fatigue and loss of blood from three wounds, 
had crawled slowly and painfully to the edge of the 
pond, and there found a birch canoe. He managed 
to enter it and push it off from the shore. Then he 
lay down in it, and the wind wafted the craft to the 
western side of the pond. After a while he recovered 
his strength a little, and he finally reached the Ossipee 
fort. 

The rest of the party had travelled no more than a 
mile or two when four of them stopped, unable to keep 
longer on their feet. At their request the others went 
on. They themselves presently resumed the journey, 
and continued for several days, alternately resting 
and walking a little way. But they grew weaker and 
weaker, and first one and then a second sank to rise no 
more. One of the remaining two reached the Ossipee 
fort, and the fourth man made his way along the side 
of the Saco River down to Biddeford, where he arrived 
emaciated by hunger almost to a skeleton. 

It was Wednesday when the remnant of Lovewell's 
band got to Ossipee Pond, so slowly did they travel, 
and so indirect was their route. They found the fort 
deserted. One of the company had run away at the be- 
ginning of the fight, and reported to the men at the fort 
that Captain Love well had met with disaster. They 



32! 



New England 



did not doubt that all his force had been killed or cap- 
tured, and that the savages would fall on the fort next. 



■1 


JJH 




^^^^^H 



The headwaters of the Saco 



So they considered it prudent to start for the settle- 
ments. 

Luckily they left some bread and pork, and these 
saved the fugitives from starvation. The only food 
of the little band during their retreat had been a few 
roots and the bark of trees. After a short rest they 
went on, and at last reached home, where they were 
received with great joy, as if they had been restored 
from the dead. 











ml 




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W$^ := 


m 


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w Jmkk- 


w 1 


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r^ "" 





In the heart of the Maine woods 
The Maine Forests 

ALL the eastern portion of the United States was 
formerly heavily timbered, but now most of the 
trees have been cleared away to make room for the 
cultivation of crops and for pasturing domestic ani- 
mals. The forests that remain are chiefly in regions 
329 



330 



New England 



where the land is not desirable for farms, or in dis- 
tricts far away from settled communities. But in 
northern New England extensive forests still exist. 
Nearly all of Maine from the White Mountains eastward 
is woodland, and in it both Connecticut and Rhode 
Island might be placed and lost to the world and to 
each other. If you climb Mount Katahdin, the state's 
loftiest mountain, which rises to a height of 5273 feet. 




Mount Katahdin from the West Branch of the Penobscot 



you can see from its summit only trees as far as the 
eye can reach. Katahdin is almost in the exact centre 
of the state. 

The forest once contained many tall pines that thrust 
up above the other trees and gave to Maine the title 
of "The Pine Tree State." But these big pines have 



The Maine Forests 



33 



nearly all been cut now, and the most numerous of the 
valuable forest trees that remain are spruce. An 
immense amount of timber comes from Maine's wil- 
derness every year. 

Formerly logging did not begin until early in the 
winter when the boggy places in the rude forest roads 
had been frozen and the snow had smoothed over their 
unevenness. Now cutting starts in late summer that 
the logs may 
be ready to be 
moved when 
the snow 
comes. Some- 
what before a 
lumber crew 
begins work 
an advance 
guard goes to 
the forest 
where their employers' claim is located. They select 
a spot near one of the lakes or small streams that are 
so numerous in the swampy northern woodland, and 
establish a camp to serve them and their comrades 
during the long cold winter. A hut is built of logs. 
The ends of the logs are notched so they will fit firmly 
together, and the chinks between them are stopped 
with moss and clay. A stone fireplace is constructed 
at one end. The roof is made of long split shingles 
covered with spruce boughs, which, after the first fall 




A lumberman's camp 



332 New England 

of snow, keep out the wind and frost very effectively. 
Under the roof is a loft with the men's bunks ranged 
along the walls. 

In the early days the huts had only the hard-trodden 
earth for floors, but now every camp is fitted up with 
a certain rude comfort. There are plank floors, long 
tables and benches, and a considerable assortment of 
dishes. Plenty of good food that is varied enough not 
to get tiresome is provided. Bread, doughnuts, beef, 
pork, codfish, potatoes, beans, and molasses are the 
staples. Sometimes a lucky shot may secure bear or 
moose meat to feast on for a few days. 

The beans are cooked to perfection in a bean hole — 
an excavation three or four feet deep just outside of 
the log dweUing. Late in the day a fire is built in the 
hole, and when the wood is reduced to a great heap of 
coals the bean pot, with the beans and some tins of 
brown bread inside, is placed in the hole and covered 
with coals. Ashes and earth are then heaped on, and 
the pot is left there through the night. It is exhumed 
in the early morning, and the beans and brown bread 
are eaten for breakfast. The woodsmen all agree that 
beanhole beans are far superior to the oven product. 

Near the cabin dwelling of the choppers another is 
built with much care to make it snug for the horses. 
Tote teams usually have brought supplies into the 
woods at the end of the previous winter while the 
roads were still frozen and snowy. 

A boss is in charge of the crew, and he sees that the 



The Maine Forests 333 

choppers, teamsters, and cook do their work properly. 
He decides where to begin felling the trees, and then all 
hands clear a road from that spot to the lake or stream. 
Over this road the logs are drawn later. They are 
left either on the ice of the lake or at landings beside 
the stream. The men are busy plying their axes 
and saws from dawn until sunset, except for a short 
pause at noon for dinner. Often the evenings are 
enlivened by songs and games. 

There is more or less danger in swinging the axes 
and felling the trees and handling the logs, and oc- 
casionally a man is wounded or even killed. A broken 
limb, or a deep axe cut, or sickness is a serious matter 
in the lonely woodland far from any village or town. 

When the spring sun melts the ice and snow, the 
piles of logs on the frozen lakes are set afloat, and those 
on the banks of the streams are rolled down into the 
flooded waterways. The arduous and exciting work of 
the river-driver now begins. He scorns danger and 
discomfort, and the different crews vie with each other 
in deeds of skill and daring. The men carry a long 
pole or a cant-hook, and their shoe soles are set thick 
with sharp iron points so they can leap about on the 
smooth logs without sHpping. They urge the logs 
onward where the current is slow, and try to avoid 
their forming jams in channels which are narrow or 
rocky. 

Often the chance lodging of one or two logs will 
obstruct the passage, and others pressing on behind 



334 



New England 



will pile up one above the other in the greatest con- 
fusion. To break one of these jams is a difhcult and 
perhaps perilous task. There are times when this has 
to be done by cutting through a single log which holds 
back all the rest. The instant it is severed the whole 
mighty mass is let loose, and only by the greatest 
alertness and good judgment can the chopper escape. 




©KalkhojfCo.,N. Y. 



Kennebago Falls 

If the jam forms between high rocky shores, a man 
may be let down by a rope from a cliff to set the logs 
moving again. 

The lumber companies improve the streams by clear- 
ing away obstructions that are likely to cause trouble, 



The Maine Forests 335 

and they build dams at the outlets of the lakes to re- 
tain the water until it is needed to float the logs. 

When the logs reach their destination they are 
stopped by a boom that stretches across the river, and 
they are gradually conducted thence to the neighboring 
sawmills, which, with their teeth of steel, transform 
them into beams, boards, and lath. In the big modern 
mills there is no waste. The sawdust is burned in the 
engine boilers, and portions of the logs that will not 
make good lumber can be sold for making paper-pulp, 
or for firewood. 

Spruce is the wood most used for paper, though a 
number of other trees also furnish good fibre. Crooked 
and seamy logs and small trees and sawmill fragments 
that formerly had no value are excellent for pulp. After 
the logs have been cut into suitable lengths, a ma- 
chine with rotating blades gnaws off the bark. Then 
the knots are bored out. For coarse grades of paper 
the wood is ground into fibre by being pressed against 
a grindstone. For better paper it is slashed into chips, 
and the chips are converted into pulp by a chemical 
process. 

Some of the pulp companies have bought great tracts 
of forest, where by wise and careful cutting the spruce 
may grow as fast as used. A large portion of the 
material that goes into wrapping-paper, newspapers, 
books, and cheap grades of writing-paper is made 
from wood-pulp. The first wood-pulp mill began 
operations in 1870. 



33^ 



New England 



Of all the forest trees none was put to more uses by 
the Indians and pioneer settlers than the paper birch. 




A canoe in Lhe wilderness 

The woodsman with his axe could obtain from it tent, 
boat, buckets, cups, plates, table-cloths, paper to write 
on, torches, and kindhngs and other fuel. A piece of 
bark a yard square could be made into a vessel for catch- 
ing maple sap by folding it into a straight-sided pan 
and bending the corners around and fastening them in 
place with a wooden pin. 

A forest visitor about the year 1880 tells how his 
guide made a birch-bark canoe. It had just been com- 
pleted when he arrived. The guide had spent two days 
ranging the mountains looking for a suitable tree, and 
a week more transforming the bark into a boat. The 



The Maine Forests 337 

canoe was twelve feet long. Three trees besides the 
birch contributed to its making. The white cedar 
furnished ribs and lining, the spruce fibrous roots to 
sew its joints and bind its frame, and from the pine 
was obtained pitch to stop its seams and cracks. 

The forest visitor records that one day while tramp- 
ing they were overtaken by a shower, and the guide 
quickly stripped large sheets of bark from a near 
tree to serve for umbrellas. When they moved on after 
the shower, the visitor wrapped his bark about him like 
an apron to shield his clothes from the wet bushes. 

There are many mills along the little streams that 
come from the wooded uplands in various parts of the 
state. These mills convert both hard and soft wood 
into such articles as furniture, sleds, tool handles, toys, 
clothespins, and toothpicks. Much fine white birch 
wood grows in some sections, and thousands of cords 
of it are used yearly for spools. It is first sawed into 
square strips and left in piles to dry. Later the strips 
are fed into automatic machines which quickly turn 
them into spools of the required size. 

One important use of the forests is to prevent the 
rapid running off of water. The roots and spongy 
leaf mould and the shade all help to hold the moisture. 
Where the forest has been carelessly destroyed by 
lumbermen or laid waste by fire, the water from storms 
and melting snow quickly escapes to the streams, and 
sudden floods are a result, while in dry times the water 
in the streams is very low. This entails danger to 



338 New England 

crops and dwellings along the banks of the streams, 
and uncertain water-power for the mills. Thus it is 
essential to conserve the forests at the headwaters of 
our rivers, and the government is buying large areas 
of such woodland, in part for this purpose, and in part 
to ensure a future supply of lumber. 

In the hardwood forests, which are leafless in win- 
ter, spring is the time for fires, for after the snow is 




A forest fire 

gone the sun shines through the bare branches and 
makes last year's leaves as dry as tinder. A lighted 
match or cigar stub heedlessly dropped is all that is 
needed to start a fire that may do enormous damage. 
The fire spreads very rapidly if a high wind is blowing, 
and the men who attempt to put it out often have a 
difficult task. They may have to fight it day and 
night for a week or more. 



The Maine Forests 339 

The ground in the evergreen woodlands continues 
moist all through the spring, and they suffer most from 
fires in a summer drought. There may be many fires 
burning at the same time, and the air will be hazy with 
smoke over great stretches of country. Something like 
a hundred years is required for large forest trees to 
grow, and when a fire makes a clean sweep killing all 
the trees in its path, the loss is a very serious one. 

Perhaps the greatest of Maine's forest fires occurred 
in 1762. There was a long drought in the spring, and 
the tree foHage in June was shrivelled and blighted for 
lack of moisture. The next month a fire started in 
the New Hampshire woods and swept eastward across 
York and Cumberland counties to the sea. Not until 
copious rains fell late in August were the flames checked 
in their devastating course. 

Maine contains more than eighteen hundred lakes 
and ponds. All these, together with the rivers, have a 
surface amounting to fully one-tenth of the land area of 
the state. Most of the lakes and ponds have wooded 
surroundings. The largest lake is Moosehead. It 
is forty miles long and from four to twelve broad. 
From its borders Mount Kineo rises eight hundred 
feet above the lake level. The mountain faces the 
water in so perpendicular a precipice that a person 
could jump into the lake from its top. This is the 
largest mass of hornstone known in the world, and 
the New England Indians got from it much of the 
flint they used for their arrow-heads. 



340 



New England 



The solitudes around Moosehead are frequented by 
big game, the streams are full of fish, and the lakes 
abound with water-fowl. Here and there a few faint 
trails wind through the forest, most of them of little 




Moosehead Lake from Kineo 

use except in winter ; and the rivers and lakes are the 
chief thoroughfares, just as they were in the days of 
the first explorers. Even the Indians are not alto- 
gether lacking, for a remnant of the once powerful 
Penobscot tribe has survived, and some of its members 
continue to resort to the woods to hunt and fish and 
act as guides. 

The four hundred persons who constitute this In- 
dian tribe have permanent dwellings on the outskirts 
of the wilderness at Old town, where they occupy an 



The Maine Forests 



34: 



island in the river. A lumberman's bateau rowed by 
a swarthy Indian gives access to the island. Among 
the dwelHngs, which are set helter-skelter in a some- 
what close group at one end of the island, are a public 
hall, a school-house, and a good-sized church. There 
are no streets nor roads — • only paths. 




Squaw Mountain 



The tribe owns considerable land which the state 
looks after, and from which there is an annual income 
of about twenty dollars for each individual. Oc- 
casionally a young islander goes to college, and some of 
them have won fame playing ball in the national 
leagues. 

The levels of many of the wilderness lakes vary only 
a few feet, and boatmen, by short portages, or by 
none at all, pass easily from one to another. There 



342 



New England 



are mail-carriers on some of the forest streams. One 
such mail-carrier paddles his canoe twenty miles from 
Moosehead Lake to Lake Chesuncook, where there are 
two tiny settlements. The journey takes him all day, 
and he returns the next day. At each of the Chesun- 
cook settlements is a school-house, and the teachers 
come in canoes from the world outside. 

Hunters, fishermen, and other pleasure-seekers often 
make long trips on the streams and lakes for days 

and weeks at a 

time. A guide 
and two persons 
can travel com- 
fortably in a 
canoe and carry 
a tent, food, and 
the necessary 
camp utensils. 
These trips are 
not without a 
spice of danger, 
for there are 
rocky rapids to run, and wide lakes to cross where 
the waves sometimes threaten to engulf the frail 
canoe. 

Many deer and moose and a few caribou inhabit the 
wild lands. These animals are protected by law most 
of the year, but, during the open season in the fall when 
shooting is allowed, thousands of sportsmen flock from 




Ack 



he forest boi 



The Maine Forests 



343 



the cities near and far to stay a few days or perhaps a 
few weeks at camps beside remote lakes and streams. 
They come partly to enjoy the crisp air and the beauty 
of the woodlands and the rough and ready life of the 
wilderness, but chiefly for the excitement of hunting 
big game. 

Scarcely less well known than Moosehead Lake are 
the Rangeley Lakes, nesthng among forested hills in 




© Kalkhojr Co.. N. Y. 



One of the Rangeley Lakes 

the northwest corner of the state. They are called a 
fisherman's paradise. There are five of them, all con- 
nected by navigable waterways, and small steamers 
ply on them and call at the various camps. 




Mending a sail, Mount Desert 
The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 

AFTER the English became masters of Canada, and 
French and Indian raiders from the north were no 
longer to be feared, the tide of immigration from the 
older settlements of New England set strongly east- 
ward. In the summers of 1760 and 1761 hundreds of 
344 



The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 345 

men were hastening to Maine in every kind of craft 
that would float; The new free lands were an irresist- 
ible bait, the forests promised inexhaustible supplies 
of timber, the swift streams gave power for grist and 
sawmills, and the waters teemed with fish. As a rule 
only the men went the first season, and after choos- 
ing sites for their habitations and making clearings 
they sailed for their old homes. But the next spring 
they returned with their families. Usually two or 
three families made the voyage together and lived in 
the vessel until the log houses were built. It was this 
hardy race of settlers that founded all the shore towns 
east of Penobscot Bay. 

This entire coast and that in the other direction as 
far as Portland is a labyrinth of headlands, bays, and 
isles. The shore-line is so jagged it resembles the 
teeth of a saw, and there are so jnany sheltered bays 
and inlets that Maine is sometimes called "The State 
of One Hundred Harbors." However, from Casco 
Bay south the coast is indented comparatively little, 
and the sandy beaches of Old Orchard, York, and other 
towns along the shore are well-known summer resorts. 
The irregularity of Maine's coast-line as a whole is 
such that it is nearly twenty-five hundred miles 
long. 

Many lighthouses are needed to warn ships away 
from the reefs and rocky islands. All the New Eng- 
land coast is dotted with them, some tall, some short, 
some on craggy islets, some on outjutting cliffs or high 



34^ 



New England 



banks, some rising out of the sea. For the effective 
service of the lighthouses we are greatly indebted to a 
native of France named Fresnel. As a boy he disliked 
learning from books, and when he was eight years old 
he did not know his letters. But he was very fond of 
making experiments, and this induced his parents to 
send him from the small town where they lived to a 
special school in Paris. There he worked very earn- 
estly and at length became an engineer, and invented 
a way to cause the light in a lighthouse to be seen a 
long distance. He improved the lamp, and he en- 
closed the light with a sort of glass barrel of many lenses 




Old Orchard Beach 



so arranged that all the light rays would go forth to 
illumine the sea, and not skyward or toward the ground 



The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 347 

or water at the foot of the Hghthouse. Often the hght 
can be seen twenty miles away. 

Some of the hghts are fixed hghts, and may be either 
red or yellow. Others revolve so that they flash forth 
at intervals. Each lighthouse has its characteristic 
light. For instance, a light on Marthas Vineyard 




Portland Head Light 

flashes once in ten seconds, and every fourth flash is 
red. Provincetown has a red light that flashes every 
fifteen seconds. Boston Light flashes white every 
thirty seconds. The government prints a catalogue of 
ah the Hghthouses. This tells the kind of hght given 
out by each of them. All ships carry the catalogue, and 
if a vessel goes astray in a storm it can usually tell 
where it is as soon as it sights the light of a hghthouse. 



34^ New England 

The lighthouses are made as conspicuous as possible 
so they can be quickly recognized in the daytime by 
their shape or color. One will be white, another red, 
another striped horizontally red and white, another 
banded in a black and white spiral. 

Besides maintaining lighthouses the government has 
established life-saving stations where men are ever 
on the watch during the stormy part of the year to 
rescue people from wrecks. Hundreds of persons are 
rescued from death every year, and millions of dollars' 
worth of property saved. 

Fishing, ship-building, and commerce once brought 
prosperity to the little towns along the Maine coast, 
but in recent times these industries have concentrated 
in places with good railway connections. Many of the 
young people have sought work and a livelier environ- 
ment in the cities, and the seaboard population has 
decreased. Every village used to send schooners to the 
fishing banks. Now very few sail except from Portland. 
The shore fisheries are, however, important, and more 
than seventy factories are engaged in canning lobsters, 
clams, and small herring. 

The lobsters are caught in cage-like traps called 
lobster pots. The pots are weighted with stones and 
lowered to the bottom where the lobsters crawl around 
among the rocks and seaweed. Inside of each pot is 
a fish head for bait, and when the lobster crawls in to 
get it he is too stupid to find his way out of the small 
inward-projecting opening. 



The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 349 

Clams live buried in the mud flats. The flats are ex- 
posed to view at low tide. Then the men and boys dig 
the clams out much as a farmer digs potatoes. 




©KatkhollCo.. \. y. 

"Lobster-Charlie" with a six-pounder 

In Europe various Httle fishes have long been canned 
as sardines, and since 1875 the industry has developed 
on the coast of Maine. When herring are feeding, 
they swim at the surface of the tidal currents and can 
be caught in weirs. The weirs are closely woven brush 
fences built out from the shore with the outer end 
curved nearly back on itself and finally turned a short 
distance into the enclosure, but having a small open 
space for an entrance. As the school of herring moves 
along with the tide the brush fence turns them into the 
enclosure, where they continue to swim slowly around 



350 New England 

in a circle without finding the blind entrance. Pres- 
ently a boat containing a seine arrives. The seine is 
stretched across the entrance, and the boat moves 
around the inner side of the enclosure paying out the 




An inlet on the coast 

net until its ends are brought together. At its lower 
edge is a purse line which is drawn to close the bottom 
of the seine. Then the entire seine is hauled in so that 
the fish are in a sufficiently reduced space to be taken 
with dip-nets into the boat. Small steamers collect the 
catch and deliver it at the factories, where the fish are 
cleaned while fresh by men, women, and child workers. 
Then they are soaked in brine, dried on wire flakes, 
cooked in hot oil for two or three minutes, and packed in 
small tin boxes. Many full-grown herring are smoked. 
The heads and other refuse are made into fertihzer. 



The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 351 

The Maine coast is a very attractive summer re- 
sort region. No matter how hot the weather may be 
inland, the sea breezes and cool water usually make 
the air along shore quite comfortable. The coast is 
delightfully bold and picturesque, and the little 
steamers that thread the channels among the islands 
bring a multitude of visitors to it every year. Some 
places have become prosperous simply through sup- 
plying the wants of the warm weather cottagers and 




Where sea and land meet 



boarders. One of the largest of the summer colonies 
is that which dwells on the islands of Casco Bay. Many 
of the families that have vacation homes there are 
from Canada and the Western States. 



352 New England 

The largest and most beautiful Maine island, how- 
ever, is Mount Desert, the fame of which is world- 
wide. It is about fourteen miles long and seven broad. 
The mainland is close at hand, and the island is sep- 
arated from it only by narrow winding waterways. 
There are thirteen mountains on the island, and an 
equal number of lakes nestle in the hollows and wild 
ravines. The loftiest height can be seen sixty miles 
out at sea. 

When the white men came to the island it was a 
favorite resort of the Indians. The waters abounded 
with fish, and game birds and animals were plentiful 
on the land. It was discovered by Champlain, the 
great French explorer, in 1604. His description of it 
says that the summits of the mountains were all bare 
and rocky. Therefore, he called it "The Isle of Desert 
Mountains." 

The French started a settlement at Mount Desert 
seven years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. 
They built a little fort and a number of houses, and 
laid out their gardens, and their priests set to work to 
convert the Indians. But presently an armed English 
ship from Virginia appeared one summer day and 
saluted them with a broadside of guns. The settle- 
ment was destroyed, and the Frenchmen were seized 
as intruders in the territory of the king of England. 

The first white man to establish a permanent home 
on the island was Abraham Somes of Gloucester. He 
came to Mount Desert in his fishing boat in 1761, and 



The Coast with a Hundred Harbors 353 

cut a load of barrel staves which he carried back. The 
next year he voyaged to the island with his wife and 
four children, and built a log-house up at the head of 
the sound which bears his name. Another Gloucester 
family came the same year and settled close by. The 
population gradually increased, but for a full century 




Bar Harbor 

the dwellers got practically all their livelihood from 
farming and fishing. 

About i860 the island began to win the favor of 
wandering artists and parties of college students on a 
vacation. Bar Harbor was then a primitive village 
of farmers and fishermen. The land was thin and 
poor, and the point on which the town afterward grew 
was bushclad and desolate. Yet in twenty years Bar 
Harbor became one of the most popular resorts on the 
New England coast. 




Indian Head on Pleasant River 

Maine Places, Industries, and Famous People 

PORTLAND is by far the largest place in the state. 
The hilly peninsula on which the city is located 
is about three miles long and has an average width 
of less than a mile. It is so compactly settled that 
almost every available building spot is occupied. 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 355 

The first cabins were erected on the spot in 1632. 
For about a quarter of a century it was known as 
Casco Neck, and after that as Falmouth. Not until 
1785 did it become Portland. 

In 1676 and again in 1690 it was completely destroyed 
by the Indians. On the latter occasion no one was 
left to bury the slain. More than two years later a 
ship that was voyaging along the coast stopped there, 
and the crew gathered the bleached bones and buried 
them. 

At the beginning of the Revolution the place con- 
sisted of about five hundred dwellings and stores, with 
many barns and stables. One October day in 1775 
the inhabitants were alarmed by the sight of four 
British vessels entering their harbor. The next day 
they received a letter from the commander of the 
fleet stating that in two hours he would bombard the 
town. A committee at once went to the commander 
to protest, and a day's respite was secured by de- 
livering to him eight stands of small arms. He offered 
a further delay if they would bring him four cannon 
and such other arms and ammunition as they possessed. 

The town was completely at his mercy, but at dawn 
the following morning the citizens held a meeting and 
resolved to sacrifice their homes rather than to sur- 
render the rest of their precious guns and ammunition. 
The committee informed the captain of this decision 
and besought him for a longer respite, but he said, "I 
will give you thirty minutes and no more." 



35^ New England 

There were few teams in the place, and nearly all the 
household goods still remained in the dwellings or 
piled up before the doors when the vessels' batteries 
opened on the town. Cannon balls, bombs, and 
grape-shot were showered on the defenceless village, 
and most of the people fled for their lives. Many of 
them saved only what they bore away on their backs. 
Armed parties from the ships came on shore and ap- 
plied torches to the buildings. One of the few persons 
who did not leave was the landlady of the fashionable 
tavern of the place. She extinguished the fires on her 
premises with buckets of water as fast as they were kin- 
dled. Toward night, when the bombardment ceased 
and the fleet sailed away, the greater part of the town 
had been destroyed. 

After the second war with England trade with the 
West Indies rapidly developed. Lumber and fish were 
the chief exports. The return cargoes were sugar and 
molasses. For many years Portland's imports in these 
lines exceeded those of New York and Boston. The 
molasses was distilled into rum in large quantities until 
temperance reform, under the lead of the Portland 
philanthopist, Neal Dow, closed the distilleries. 

The first steamboat used on the coast was made 
by a Portland captain in 1822. He placed an old 
engine on a flat-bottomed boat, and rigged up some 
paddle-wheels so that he was able to run the craft to 
the islands of Casco Bay and some of the adjacent 
mainland towns. He called his vessel the Kennebec, 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 357 

but the people called it the Horned Hog. The next 
year a steamboat went into service as a passenger 
vessel between Portland and Boston, and another 
steamboat began making trips on the Kennebec River. 

It was a great event for Portland when that city 
was connected by railroad with Montreal in 1853. 
Since then it has been a winter seaport of Canada, while 
the St. Lawrence River is frozen over. Grain, cattle, 
and other Canadian products arrive on the railroad, 
and are transferred to steamships, which cross the 
ocean to England. Other steamship lines connect 
Portland with the leading American coast cities, and 
railways radiate from it in all directions to the impor- 
tant trade centres. 

On July 4, 1866, a fire-cracker carelessly thrown into 
a builder's shop started a conflagration which raged 
for fifteen hours until a change of wind enabled Port- 
land's firemen and engines, with the aid of those that 
had come from other places, to control the flames. 
The fire swept over two hundred acres in the centre of 
the city, burned eighteen hundred buildings, rendered 
six thousand persons homeless, and caused a property 
loss of fifteen million dollars. 

The first house in Portland to be built entirely of 
brick was erected in 1785 by the grandfather of the 
poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poet was 
brought to this house as an infant, and it was his 
home until his marriage. To the end of his life he 
stayed there whenever he visited the scenes of his 



358 



New England 



youth, and many of his best poems were written in it. 
He was born in 1807 in a three-story frame house in 
the easterly part of the town near the harbor. 

Longfellow graduated at Bowdoin College, in the 
manufacturing city of Brunswick, and was for some 

years a Bowdoin pro- 
fessor. Hawthorne 
was another famous 
Bowdoin collegian. 

Harriet Beecher 
Stowe was living at 
Brunswick when she 
wrote "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." Her husband 
was at that time an 
instructor in the col- 
lege. She did the 
writing amid heavy 
domestic responsibili- 
ties, with untrained 
servants to oversee, a 
baby to take care of, and several pupils in the family 
to whom she gave daily lessons with her own children. 
The sale of the book was enormous from the very first, 
and it has been translated into at least nineteen foreign 
languages. The story was dramatized, and probably 
no other play has been produced so many times. 

Bath is the ship-building city of Maine. It has a 
deep, safe harbor, and can conveniently receive coal 




Henry W. Longfellow 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 359 

and iron by sea, and lumber from the Androscoggin 
and Kennebec rivers. The vessels that are launched 
from the Bath shipyards vary greatly in size and kind. 
They are both wooden and steel, and include barges, 
schooners, steamers, and even warships, 

Bangor on the Penobscot is the most notable lumber 
centre in New England. It gets water power from 
falls, logs can be floated to it direct from the forests, 
and the river below is navigable for ocean-going ves- 
sels, so that the lumber can be sent away to advantage. 




Grand Falls on Dead River 



Augusta, the capital of the state, is the largest city 
on the Kennebec. It is like Bangor in having water- 
power and being at the head of ship navigation. 



360 New England 

The Kennebec and the Penobscot produce wealth in 
winter as well as in summer, for they are an important 
source of ice supply. When you pass up beyond 
where the salt water penetrates you find at frequent 
intervals the big wide-spreading buildings in which the 
ice is stored. 

Maine winters are cold enough to make the crop a 
tolerably sure one, and the ice is cut over the very spots 
where the ocean vessels moor the next summer to take 
on loads of it which they carry to cities on the coast 
farther south. The ice harvested from the twenty-five 
miles of the Kennebec below Augusta is worth two 
or three million dollars a year. 

As soon as the ice is strong enough to bear the 
weight of a man, claims are marked out by setting up 
bushes or stakes. A few days later the ice is usually 
thick enough to be safe for a horse, and then it is 
gone over with a scraper after every snow-storm, for 
ice will not make rapidly when it is blanketed with 
snow. If the snow unfortunately comes before the 
scraper can be used, holes are cut in the ice to let the 
water up through. This freezes, and presently a horse- 
drawn planer can venture on the ice, and the worthless 
snow-ice is removed. 

Usually the ice attains a thickness of twelve inches 
early in January, and cutting and storing begin. The 
field is marked off with a grooving machine, and after- 
ward the ice-ploughs go over it cutting deeper and 
deeper until the blocks of ice can be barred ofi in 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 361 

sections of several cakes. There is an inclined plane 
from the water up to each ice-house. On this incline 
is a track that can be kept moving by machinery so it 
will carry the ice blocks from the stream to the build- 
ing. A canal is cut from the elevator out into the river, 
and through this the ice-block sections are floated. 
Near the foot of the elevator the canal is spanned by 




At the mouth of the Kennebunk 



a plank, and on this stands a man jabbing with an 
iron bar as the ice sections pass under him and separat- 
ing them into single cakes. At night some one has to 
stay beside the canal to keep it open. No matter how 
many degrees below zero the mercury may go, there 
you find him toiling back and forth towing a drag made 
of heavy pieces of wood fastened together in the form 
of a triangle. This breaks up the thin sheets of new 
ice as fast as they form. 



362 New England 

The harvest comes to an end about the first of 
March, and after that the river is pretty much deserted 
until warm weather navigation is resumed. Then, for 
many months, schooners and barges are always being 
towed by tugs up or down, or are being loaded at the 
ice wharves. 

One of the worst years Maine ever experienced was 
181 7. An unusually cold winter was followed by a 
backward spring, and the weather continued to be so 
unseasonable that the crops were failures, and the 
year was long afterward familiarly known as eighteen 
hundred and freeze to death. Thousands of dis- 
couraged farmers sold their property at a great loss 
and emigrated to Ohio and Kentucky. But within a 
few years Maine again became prosperous, and many 
of those who had moved away returned. 

Farming is the leading industry in most of the 
country towns south of the forest region. Milk and 
vegetables are produced for the cities, and there are 
numerous creameries. Many fine winter apples are 
sent away from the farm orchards. Immense quan- 
tities of apples, squashes, blueberries, and sweet corn 
are canned and shipped to the big towns to be sold 
in the grocery stores. 

It is claimed that the climate and soil of Maine 
produce a quaHty of sweet corn no other state can 
equal. The owners of the canneries bargain with the 
farmers in the spring to plant land to sweet corn and 
agree to buy the crop at a certain price. In the early 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 363 

fall the ears are caked to the canneries and husked, 
and the milky kernels are cut off by machines. After 
being sweetened and cooked, the corn, while yet steam- 
ing, is put in cans which are at once sealed. Finally 
the cans are labeled and packed in boxes. Blueberries 
grow wild in all parts of the state, but are particularly 
plentiful in several rocky townships of Washington 
County which have been largely swept by fire. Here 
the blueberry lands are leased in sections of one hun- 
dred acres or more, and the lessees burn over about 
one third of the surface each spring, for the blueberry 
bushes wUl not thrive if the land is allowed to grow up 
to brush or trees. The harvest continues for about 
six weeks, and most of the hundreds of pickers camp 
on the grounds. The berries are hauled daily to the 
canning factory, or are sent away fresh to the city 
markets. The picking is done chiefly by women and 
children. 

In the northeastern part of the state is a very rich 
new agricultural country. The soil is loose and open, 
and the surface gently roUing. Wheat and other 
grains are grown, and flour is made in the local grist 
mills, but potatoes are the principal farm product, 
particularly in the great county of Aroostook, which 
is nearly as large as the entire state of Massachusetts. 
The total amount of potatoes produced in the county, 
the quality, and the yield per acre are all impressive. 
They are planted, cultivated, and dug by machines. 
Most of them are sold for food or to be used for seed 



3^4 



New England 



in other states, but the smaller ones are taken to fac- 
tories to be made into starch. 

One of the valuable products of Maine is stone. 
There are great quarries at various places along the 




In an Aroostook potato lield The >ield was at the rate 
of four hundred and sixty-two bushels to an acre 

coast where granite is blasted out, cut into such shapes 
and sizes as are desired, and shipped to different parts 
of the country. Much of the granite is used for street 
paving or the walls of buildings, but the varied colors 
of different granites and the enduring beauty of their 
polished surfaces have led to the use of the stone in the 
interior of buildings and for monuments in cemeteries. 
It is very hard, and the fashioning of it has to be done 
chiefly by means of the chisel and hammer, and by a 
power drill run by compressed air. This power drill 
is held by a workman, and he directs its swift blows 
against the stone. 



Maine Places, Industries, and People 365 

In and around Rockland are inexhaustible limestone 
beds that have been worked for two centuries, and 
the lime produced in Maine exceeds the output of any 
other state. Formerly the rock was drilled by hand, 
blasted with powder, and hauled in ox carts to the 
kilns where it was burned with wood fires for several 
days to make lime. Now power drills prepare the holes 
for the dynamite used, and the stone is hoisted on 
electric cable-ways to cars that take it to the kilns at 
the wharves. There the lime is burned in a single day 
by using soft coal and a forced draft. 

Among Maine's famous men perhaps none is more 
widely known than the humorist, "Artemus Ward.'' 
He was born in 1834 in the little 
village of Waterford, some fifty 
miles north of Portland. His real 
name was Charles Farrar Browne. 
As a boy he was so given to 
pranks that the neighbors freely 
predicted that he would never 
come to any good. One of his 
earliest exploits was the organiz- 
ing of a circus. He put on a 
gown of his mother's and her 
best bonnet, and acted as clown 
and manager-in-chief, with his village cronies for assist- 
ants. His father's red crumple-horn cow, covered 
with blankets of different colors and having a stuffed 
coat sleeve for a trunk, served as the elephant. The 




"Artemus Ward,' 
the humorist 



366 New England 

calves and the dogs and cats did for other strange 
animals. 

When Charles was thirteen his father died, and soon 
afterward the boy left home to earn his own living. 
After he grew up and had won fame as a writer and 
lecturer his "summer loaf," as he called it, was usually 
spent at the old homestead in Waterford. He died 
when not quite thirty-three years old. 

Another notable Maine writer was Jacob Abbott, 
who was born in 1803 at Hallo well on the Kennebec. 
He was one of five brothers, all of whom became 
preachers and teachers, and, with a single exception, 
authors. In the middle of the century he was the 
most popular American writer for children. His Rollo 
Books were particularly famous. 

In later Hfe he lived at Farmington, where he had a 
place which he called "Fewacres," on high ground 
overlooking a river winding through one of the most 
fertile and tranquil valleys in New England. He 
built bridges, made paths, put up benches for seats, 
broadened and deepened a brook into a pond for the 
enjoyment of his boys, and made the place a little 
paradise. 

A third Maine writer, whose stories are particularly 
noteworthy, was Sarah Orne Jewett. Her birthplace 
was South Berwick. New England Hfe and nature 
have never been portrayed more faithfully than in her 
delightful books. 



INDEX 



Abbott, Jacob, 366 
Adams, John, 100 
Adams, John Quincy, loi 
Agriculture, 8, 143, 173, 159, 

303, 362 
Alcott, Louisa M., 160 
/Vlden, John, 54 
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 275 
Allen, Ethan, 286, 292 
Amherst, N. H., 276 
Amherst College, 123 
Arnold, Benedict, 188, 194 
Aroostook County, Me., 363 
"Artemus Ward," 365 
Ascutney, Mount, 275 
Augusta, Me., 389 

Bangor, Me., 359 

Bar Harbor, Me., 353 

Barnum, P. T., 191 

Barre, Vt., 311 

Bath, Me., 358 

Beacon Hill, 60 

Bear Mountain, 179 

Bears, 268 

Beecher, Henry Ward, 203 

Bellows Falls, Vt., 21 

Bennington, Vt., 138, 285, 287 

Berkley, Mass., 148 

Berkshire County, Mass., 130 

Berlin, Conn., 175 

Bethlehem, N. H., 258 

Beverly, Mass., 98, 116 

Biddeford, Me., 327 

Birds, 42 

Block, .Adrian, 17, 212 

Block Island, 211 

Blueberries, 363 



279> 



Boston, 6, 26, 27, 31, 32, 59, 279, 

347 
Boston Common, 64 
Boston Massacre, 70 
Boston Tea Party, 78 
Bowdoin College, 358 
Bradford, William, 47 
Brandon, Vt., 35 
Branford, Conn., 185 
Brattleboro, Vt., 283, 285, 310 
Bridgeport, Conn., 172, 191 
Bristol, R. I., 220, 240 
Brook Farm, 81 
Brookline, Mass., 75 
Brooklyn, Conn., 204 
Brunswick, Me., 358 
Bryant, William Cullen, 54, 123 
Bunker Hill, 74 
Burgoyne, General, 138, 312 
Burlington, Vt., 31, 292, 298 
Burr, Aaron, 141 

Cambridge, Mass., 154 

Cape Ann, 98 

Cape Cod, 2, 36 

Casco Bay, 322, 351 

Champlain, Lake, 283, 288, 293, 303 

Champlain, Samuel, 293 

Charlemont, Mass., 125 

Charlestown, Mass., 60, 74, 79, 98 

Charter Oak, 199 

Cheshire, Mass., 134 

Chocorua, Mount, 277 

Clams, 42, 349 

Clocks, 181 

Concord, Mass., 73, 157 

Concord, N. H., 31, 150, 279 

Connecticut River, 4, 12, 115, 161 



367 



368 



Index 



Cornish, N. H., 274 
Cottage City, Mass., 113 
Cotton, 146, 148, 242 
Coventry, Conn., 208 
Cowa, 304 
Cranberries, 38 
Crawford Notch, 259 
Cummington, Mass., 123 
Curfew, no 

Dana, Richard Henry, 156 
Danbury, Conn., 182 
Dancing Mortar, 219 
"Dark Day," 189 
Dartmouth College, 255, 278 
Deerfield, Mass., 126 
Derby, Conn., 182 
Dexter, Lord Timothy, 98 
Dorchester, Mass., 80 
Dover, N. H., 248 
Dunstable, Mass., 324 
Durfee Plill, 245 

East Granby, Conn., 177 

East Poultney, Vt., 301 

Echo Lake, 265 

Edwards, Jonathan, 140, 202 

Electric railroads, 35 

Eliot, John, 80, 149 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 158 

Enfield Rapids, 12, 17 

Exeter Academy, 278 

Fairfield, Vt., 302 
Fall River, Mass., 149 
Faneuil Hall, 72 
Farmington, Me., 366 
Field, Cyrus Dudley, 141 
Fish, 42, 77, 82, 242, 349 
Forests, 309, 329 
Forest fires, 267, 338 
Fort Dummer, Vt., 283 
Fort Kent, Me., 321 
Franklin, Benjamin, 69, 192 
Fryeburg, Me., 324 



Glacier, 4 

Gloucester, Mass., 84 

Goodyear, Charles, 189 

Granite, 31, 74, 100, 279, 311, 364 

Greeley, Horace, 276, 300 

Greenbach, Mass., 103 

Greene, Nathanael, 245 

Green Mountain Boys, 286, 288 

Greenwich, Conn., 207 

Greylock, Mount, 131 

Guilford, Conn., 171 

Hadley, Mass., 125, 185 

Hale, Nathan, 208 

Hallowell, Me., 366 

Hancock, John, 63 

Hanover, N. H., 255 

Hartford, Conn., 6, 26, 31, 162, 198 

Harvard College, 154 

Haverhill, Mass., 150 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 95, 141, 159 

Hingham, Mass., 10 1 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 63, 80 

Holyoke, Mass., 120 

Holyoke, Mount, 15 

Hooker, General, 126 

Hoosac Tunnel, 132 

Hope, Mount, 220, 225 

Howe, Elias, 145 

Hunting, 268, 342 

Indians, 17, 23, 47, 50, 52, 55, 
62, 80, 108, 116, 117, 138, 146, 
149, 150, 165, 212, 220, 248, 282, 
316, 322, 339 

Isles of Shoals, 272 

Jewett, Sarah Orne, 366 
"Josh Billings," 135 

Katahdin, Mount, 264, 330 
Kennebec River, 317, 360 
Kidd, Captain, 68, 129 
Killingworth, Conn., 186 
Kipling, Rudyard, 310 



Index 



369 



Kineo, Mount, 339 

King Philip's War, 5, 117, 216, 220, 

220, 248, i2 2 

Kingston, R. I., 221 

Lafayette, General, 74 

Lancaster, N. H., 146 

Lanesboro, Mass., 135 

Larcom, Lucy, 150 

Lawrence, Mass., 150 

Lebanon, Conn., 255 

Lenox, Mass., 141 

Lexington, Mass., 157 

Lighthouses, 44, 102, 345 

Litchfield, Conn., 202, 287 

Lobsters, 348 

Londonderry, N. H., 252 

Longfellow, Henry W., 54, 156, 234, 

357 
Love well, Captain, 324 
Lowell, Mass., 32, 149 
Lowell, James Russell, 156, 272 
Lynn, Mass., 152 

Mail, 26 

Maiden, Mass., 98 

^Linchester, Mass., 98 

Manchester, N. H., 255, 279, 280 

ISIansfield, Mount, 309 

]\Ianufacturing, 8, 144, 175, 198, 242, 

279 
]\Iaple sugar, 306 
Marble, 312 
Marblehead, Mass., 96 
"Mark Twain," 201 
Marshfield, Mass., 104 
Marthas Vineyard, 112, 347 
Massasoit, 52, 55, 221, 237 
Mather, Cotton, 37 
Mayflower, 46, 48 
IMemphremagog, Lake, 253 
Aleriden, Conn., 182 
Milford, Conn., 184 
Minot's Ledge Lighthouse, 102 
Mohegan Indians, 167, 212 



Monadnock, Mount, 249 
Montpelier, Vt., 292 
Moodus, Conn., 209 
Moon Hollow, 134 
Moosehead Lake, 339 
Morse, Samuel, 74 
Mount Desert, 352 
Mount Holyoke College, 1 23 

Nantucket, Mass., 85, 105 
Narragansett Indians, 55, 168, 215, 

221 
Narragansett Pier, R. I., 226 
Nashua, N. H., 279 
New Ashford, ]\Iass., 136 
New Bedford, ISIass., 149 
Newbury, Vt., 315 
Newburyport, Mass., 98 
New Haven, Conn., 26, 146, 183, 

198 
New London, Conn., 27, 170, 192 
Newport, R. I., 226 
Newton, INIass., 32 
Norsemen, 234 
North Adams, Mass., 132 
Northampton, Mass., 14, 123 
Northfield, INIass., 128 
North Kingston, R. I., 246 
North Pownal, Vt., 302 

"Old Leather Man," 209 

Old Man of the Mountain, 266 

Old Orchard, Me., 345 

Oldtown, Me., 340 

Onata, Lake, 138 

Ossipee Pond, 324 

Oysters, 195 

Paper, 121, 335 _ 
Parkman, Francis, 64 
Pawtucket, R. I., 243 
Peat, 216 

Penobscot Indians, 340 
Pequot Indians, 165 
Philip, King, 220 



370 



Index 



Phipps, William, 320 

Pilgrims, 46, 48 

Pirates, 66, 68, 77, 129, 148 

Pittsfield, Mass., 138 

Plainfield, Mass., 124 

Plymouth, Mass., 49 

Plymouth Rock, 49 

Portland, Me., 6, 322, 354 

Portsmouth, N. H., 275, 278 

Post-rider, 26 

Potatoes, 363 

Privateers, 239 

Providence, R. I., 6, 27, 32, 237 

Provincetown, Mass., 45, 347 

Putnam, General, 204 

Quakers, 66, 117 

Quincy, Mass., 31, 74, 100 

Railroads, 31 
Rangeley Lakes, 343 
Regicides, 125, 184 
Revere, Paul, 75, 157 
Roads, 23 
Rockland, Me., 365 
Roxbury, Mass., 80 
Rumney, N. H., 253 
Rutland, Vt., 288 
Rye, N. H., 248 

St. Albans, Vt., 31, 305 

St. Gaudens, Augustus, 274 

St. Johnsbury, Vt., 309 

Salem, Mass., 91 

SaUsbury, Conn., 178 

Salisbury, Mass., 107 

Salisbury, N. H., 277 

Sand dunes, 45 

Saybrook, Conn., 163, 186, 192 

Shad, 21, 280 

Shays' Rebellion, 119 

Sheep, 304 

Shipwrecks, 43, 87, 218 

Shoes, 152 

Shoreham, Vt., 288 



Shrewsbury, Mass., 153 

Slate quarries, 3 1 1 

Slave trade, 227 

Slocum, Captain Joshua, 114 

Smith, Captain John, i, 98, 318 

Smith College, 123 

Smugglers, 297 

South Berwick, Me., 366 

South Hadley Falls, Mass., 18, 19, 22 

South Kingston, R. I., 246 

South Norwalk, Conn., 208 

South Windsor, Conn., 202 

Spencer, Mass., 145 

Springfield, Mass.. 26, 32, 34, 116 

Springfield Republican, 120 

Stage-coaches, 28 

Stamford, Conn., 33 

Standish, Miles, 47, 53, 100 

Stark, John, 272, 289 

Stockbridge, Mass., 140 

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 203, 358 

Strawberry Bank, N. H., 248 

Summer resorts, 270, 351 

Sunapee Lake, 271 

Swansea, Mass., 55 

Taunton, Mass., 148 
ThompsonviUe, Conn., 182 
Thoreau, Henry D., 41, 160 
Tiverton, R. I., 229 
Tobacco, 174 
"Tom Thumb," 191 
Town crier, no 
Travel, it, 

Trowbridge, J. T., 157 
Truro, Mass., 43 
Turners Falls, Mass., 127 

Virginia, Vt., 285 

Wachusett, Mount, 146 
Waldron, Richard, 248 
Waltham, Mass., 153 
Warner, Charles Dudley, 1 24 
Warwick, R. I., 229, 246 



Index 



371 



Washington, George, 29, 155, 204 

Washington, Mount, 257, 261, 279 

Watches, 153 

Watch Hill, R. I., 226 

Waterbury, Conn., 181 

Waterford, Me., 365 

Watertown, Mass., 213 

Weather, 2 

Webster, Daniel, 74, 104, 277 

Webster, Noah, 201 

Westboro, Mass., 146 

Westbrook, Conn., 179 

\\'estfield, Mass., 120 

West Haven, Yt., 300 

Westminster, Vt., 285 

West Rutland, Vt., 312 

West Tisbury, Mass., 114 

Wethersfield, Conn., 123, 162, 167, 

186 
Whales, 42, 108, 149, 195 
Whitehall, Vt., 313 



White Mountains, 257 
Whitney, Eli, 146, 243 
Whittier, John G., 152 
Wickford, R. I., 224 
Williams, Roger, 93, 237 
Williamstovvn, Mass., 134 
Willimantic, Conn., 182 
Windmills, 40, iii 
Windsor, Conn., 162, 181 
Windsor, Vt., 275 
Winnepesaukee, Lake, 271 
Winthrop, Governor, 60, 61, 68 
Witches, 73, 93 
Woodworth, Samuel, 103 
Wool, 200 
Woolwich, Me., 320 
Worcester, Mass., 26, 32, 144 

Yale College, 185 
Yarmouth, Mass., 45 
York, Me., 319 



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